On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts, was arrested by a team of masked ICE agents on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, and whisked away to a detention facility in Louisiana. Her crime, as far as could be determined at the time, was that in 2024, she co-authored an op-ed for The Tufts Daily that urged the university’s president to divest assets from Israel and assert that Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is a “genocide.”
That is about the only thing that the public knows about the Ozturk case. Is there more to the story? We asked the State Department.
A senior State Department official told us that “every individual who has had their visa recently revoked by this administration has displayed problematic behavior that would have made them ineligible for a visa if they would have disclosed this information during the vetting process.” This official went on to say that the administration is “now revoking their visa retroactively to ensure we are taking deliberate actions to protect our communities and campuses.”