US immigration authorities have detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University near Boston who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza, Reuters reports.
Rumeysa Ozturk’s supporters say her detention, late on Tuesday, is the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student engaged in such activism to be carried out by President Donald Trump’s administration.
A video of the arrest showed masked and plainclothes agents taking the 30-year-old Turkish national into custody near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Tuesday evening, when, according to her lawyer, she was heading to meet with friends to break her fast.
US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X that authorities determined Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organisation that relishes the killing of Americans”.
Her arrest came a year after Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized Medford, Massachusetts-based Tufts’ response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.
