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Rumeysa Ozturk

Trump Sought To Deport Student Over Pro-Palestine Op-Ed

Newly released court documents confirm that US immigration authorities arrested a Turkish university student in the state of Massachusetts last year over an opinion article she wrote criticizing Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rather than for “terrorist activity,” CNN reported on 26 January. In March last year, Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student at Tufts University, was walking on the street when plainclothes immigration officers suddenly detained her. She was transported to a detention center on the other side of the country, in Louisiana, and held there for six weeks.

Courts Force Release Of Detained Students; Campus Activism Reignites

Since the last installment of this newsletter, two students detained by the Trump administration have been released on bail. Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student who was kidnapped by agents during a citizenship interview, was released from a Vermont correctional facility on April 30. “The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford. Mahdawi addressed a crowd of supporters and reporters upon his release. “For anybody who is doubting justice, this is a light of hope and faith in the justice system in America,” Mahdawi told a crowd outside the courthouse after his release.

American Rendition: Journey To A Louisiana Cell

With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined. Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. Öztürk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.
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