The widely circulated video of Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest in the Boston area has sent shockwaves through the academic community.
As Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk made her way to an interfaith centre to break the Ramadan fast on Tuesday, plainclothes officers, some masked, descended on her.
She screamed as an unmasked officer in a hooded sweatshirt grabbed her, security video shows. Within about a minute, the officers whisked her away in handcuffs.
The widely circulated video of the immigration enforcement officers - who Ozturk’s lawyer said were from the Department of Homeland Security - sent shock waves through the university community in Somerville, Massachusetts, with thousands turning out Wednesday in the Boston suburb to demand her release.
By Thursday, immigrant rights experts and Massachusetts’s Democratic elected officials expressed outrage over the incident, characterising it as unjust.
Ozturk, a 30-year-old from Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa, her lawyer Mahsa Khanbabai said in an email.
“We should all be horrified at the way DHS spirited away Rumeysa in broad daylight,” she wrote, adding that Ozturk has not been accused of any crime.
A federal district judge, considering a petition from her lawyer, ordered officers to not move the student out of Massachusetts without advance notice. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator page showed Ozturk’s location as Louisiana late on Wednesday.
According to a court filing, ICE had already transferred Ozturk out of the state when the federal judge ordered she be kept in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reported.
“DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” DHS said in an emailed statement, without sharing evidence for the claim or responding to questions about the video.
It added that “supporting terrorists” is grounds for visa termination.
Joshua Else, a senior vice president at Tufts, said on Thursday that the school had learned that Ozturk’s visa was terminated.
“The university had no knowledge of this incident in advance, did not share any information with federal authorities prior to the event,” Else said in an email to alumni.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed his role in revoking Ozturk’s visa.
“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio told reporters on Thursday at a news conference in Guyana, noting that the total number of revoked visas “might be more than 300 at this point”.
President Donald Trump has promised to deport international students he alleges are engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American” campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
But critics and lawyers for the students say that they are being targeted for expressing their political beliefs and that the government is trampling on the First Amendment right of free speech.
“Trump sent masked law enforcement officers to arrest Rumeysa Ozturk - a Tufts University grad student with legal status - without a criminal charge,” Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) wrote on X.
“Disappearances like these are part of Trump’s all-out assault on our basic freedoms.”
Ozturk does not appear to have been a leading figure in the pro-Palestinian protests at Tufts, according to the Boston Globe. She co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper in March 2024 criticising the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement.
The op-ed, written by four students and endorsed by 32 others, argued against the school’s rejection of student Senate resolutions, which they wrote were an effort “to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law”.
Rubio was asked what Ozturk did to cause the revocation of her visa, but he did not offer specifics on her case, only suggesting that his criteria go beyond writing columns and include “vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus”.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States, and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell (D) said it was alarming that the Trump administration “chose to ambush” Ozturk.
“It looked like a kidnapping,” a neighbour whose camera captured the footage, told the Associated Press.
Annie Lai, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine who specialises in immigrant rights, said some of the officers in the video do not have anything on their clothing - a badge or writing on their vest - that identifies them as law enforcement or government officials.
At one point in the video, an officer says: “We are the police”.
The fact that they did not say they were from DHS or ICE is concerning, Lai said, adding that they didn’t seem to say in the video why Ozturk was being taken into custody.
Most of the officers had their faces covered, or they covered them during the arrest.
“This gives people the sense that they can be taken without knowing who is taking them and why. That should be deeply alarming,” Lai said.
The Turkish Embassy said it was working with US authorities to ensure that Ozturk’s rights were protected, and that it was updating her family.
Tufts President Sunil Kumar and fellow campus leaders said the school was offering support to its community, including immigration resources to its international students and faculty.
“We recognise how frightening and distressing this situation is for her, her loved ones, and the larger community here at Tufts, especially our international students, staff, and faculty who may be feeling vulnerable or unsettled by these events,” the university leaders said in a statement.
A rally calling for Ozturk’s release was held near the university Wednesday night. More than 2,000 people attended, the Boston Globe reported. Students and neighbours told the newspaper they were shocked by what had happened.
Muslim advocacy groups also called for her immediate release.
Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned what she called “the abduction of a young Muslim hijab-wearing scholar by masked federal agents in broad daylight”.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council said the arrest sent “a chilling message”.
House Democrats weighed in as well. “We are carefully working with a variety of different advocacy organisations as well as our allies in the legal community and, where appropriate, Democratic attorneys general to make sure that we are forcefully pushing back against any violation of the law,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) said during a news conference.
Representative Stephen F. Lynch (Massachusetts) wrote on X that he will request Ozturk’s “immediate return”.
“Snatching an international student off our streets who is lawfully in our Country and attending one of our Universities and then bundling her off to an ICE detention centre 1,700 miles away without a hearing is a sickening reminder of the Gestapo-like conduct from another age,” Lynch said.
Ozturk is at least the seventh student or scholar to be caught up this month in the administration’s crackdown related to the Middle East conflict.
The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued the Trump administration this week over what they called its “ideological-deportation policy,” court documents show.
The complaint alleges that its policies “fail to give noncitizen students and faculty fair warning as to what speech and association the government believes to be grounds for arrest, detention, and deportation”.