A Tufts Student Criticized Israel. Then the Trump Administration Disappeared Her

“Can I just call the police?” the woman asked.

“We’re the police,” one of the masked, plainclothes agents replied before leading her away in handcuffs.

The woman, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish-born Fulbright scholar studying in a PhD program at Tufts University in Massachusetts. She was on her way to an Iftar dinner in Somerville on Tuesday when immigration enforcement officers intercepted her on a street corner, put her into an SUV, and took her away. The 30-year-old, who has apparently not been charged with a crime, was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, though federal Judge Indira Talwani ordered Tuesday that Ozturk must “not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without first providing advance notice of the intended move.”

Ozturk holds a legal F-1 visa and was arrested for engaging in “activities in support of Hamas,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the DHS said. But it did not say with any specificity what those alleged “activities” were, and Canary Mission, the pro-Israel group that targeted Ozturk for her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, seemed to point only to an an op-ed she co-authored last year for the Tufts school newspaper as evidence of her “anti-Israel activism.”

Ozturk is one of several foreign-born university students to be targeted in recent weeks as part of Donald Trump’s crackdowns on both immigration and dissent. In another high-profile case this month, federal agents arrested legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University in New York, where the Palestinian-born 30-year-old once led protests against the war in Gaza. Khalil was also transported to Louisiana.

The detentions are part of a broader Trump crusade against what a senior State Department official described as “Hamasniks,” protesters they accuse of supporting the terror group behind the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. “Everyone is fair game,” the official told Axios, describing the administration’s effort to limit foreign students at colleges that have too many who are “pro-Hamas” and to revoke visa-holders who demonstrated against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war.