Marco Rubio Fails to Answer Simple Question on Tufts Student's Arrest

Yahoo

27-03-2025

At a press conference Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to give a specific justification for the arrest and detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, by masked immigration authorities on Tuesday.
'A year ago [Ozturk] wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza war. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being revoked?' A reporter asked, referring to Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, co-authoring a column for her university's student newspaper.
Rubio responded with a long-winded answer attacking vandalism and rioting but failing to say exactly what Ozturk was responsible for that resulted in her F-1 student visa being revoked and masked, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcements brazenly arresting her on a public street.
'If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just 'cause you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we're not going to give you a visa,' Rubio said.
'If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it. We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,' added Rubio.
Rubio noted during the press conference that he has personally revoked dozens of visas, possibly 'more than 300 at this point.'
'We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,' Rubio said.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Guardian that 'DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,' but did not offer any specifics either.
In a move reminiscent of ICE's arrest and detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk was sent to a detention center in Louisiana without speaking with a lawyer and despite a court order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who initially ordered that Ozturk not be removed from Massachusetts, issued a new order Thursday requiring the government to justify Ozturk's detention by Friday.
If Rubio's words are correct, there are possibly hundreds of visitors in the United States who have had their visas revoked for pro-Palestine speech or activism, or any political speech and activism for that matter, without any due process. They may not even know that their visa status has been revoked. They could be disappeared off the street just like Khalil, Ozturk, or University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has yet to be connected to any kind of political activism and whose whereabouts are unknown.