Targeting of Tufts student for deportation stuns friends and teachers

On March 9, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, sent an anxious text message to Najiba Akbar, the university’s former Muslim chaplain, with whom she had become close.

“I recently learned that someone added all my information to a doxxing website called Canary Mission because of the op-ed published last March,” Ozturk wrote. She was trying to figure out what to do about it.

The website published her resume and a picture of her in a red headscarf, and claimed that she had “engaged in anti-Israel activism.” It also linked to an opinion essay she had written with three other students in the Tufts student newspaper, critical of the university for not sanctioning Israel over its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Ozturk had never struck the chaplain as the activist type, or the face of a movement. She was more of an introvert, the kind of person who liked to be helpful and would stay late after activities at the university’s Interfaith Center to help clean up.

So Akbar was shocked this past week when she heard that the government had revoked Ozturk’s visa.

Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations had concluded that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” according to a statement from homeland security.

At a news conference this past week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about her detention. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”

Her friends and professors said that characterization did not square with what they knew of Ozturk. “It doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Akbar said. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”

Ozturk is one of many international students whom the government is seeking to deport after President Donald Trump promised to combat antisemitism on campus and punish student protesters for misbehaving. Her detention suggests that the government is casting a wide net, finding not only prominent protesters who pushed limits and broke rules, but apparently some who were more quietly involved.

The American Civil Liberties Union signed onto the case Friday and filed court papers demanding her release from custody, arguing that detaining her is a violation of her First Amendment rights, which extend to noncitizens on American soil.

“Rumeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others,” the complaint said. Her lawyers filed the complaint in federal court in Boston, naming as defendants Trump; Rubio; Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and immigration officials.

On Friday, a federal judge ruled that she could not be moved out of the country until the court rules again.

Ozturk has not been charged with any crime, and her friends are at a loss to understand how the law-abiding, introspective student they know matches the portrait of a political activist being presented by the government.

“She doesn’t drive, but if she were to drive, she wouldn’t even have a parking ticket,” said Reyyan Bilge, a psychology professor at Northeastern University. “That’s the kind of person we’re talking about.”

Her friends also say that they had never seen any signs that Ozturk was antisemitic.

“This is not fighting antisemitism; it’s hurting your cause as well,” said Bilge, who taught Ozturk at Istanbul Sehir University in Turkey. Bilge wrote a recommendation for Ozturk for the Fulbright scholarship that brought her to the United States. She received her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.

A surveillance camera captured Ozturk’s arrest Tuesday evening. It has received millions of views and stirred widespread outrage on social media. The video shows federal agents in plainclothes and face masks surrounding her on the sidewalk. They take her phone and her backpack, handcuff her, and hustle her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was talking on her cellphone to her mother in Turkey when the ICE agents surrounded her, Bilge said, adding, “She told her mom to call her best friend” in Boston.

Her lawyer was not able to find her or to communicate with her for nearly 24 hours after she was detained, according to court papers. In the meantime, the documents say, she was without her asthma medication and suffered an asthma attack while en route to a detention center in Louisiana.

Canary Mission, the group that cited her opinion essay, says its goal is to document “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” But pro-Palestinian students say it has exposed their personal information online so they can be harassed. The group does not list employees or its funding sources on its website, and it did not immediately return a request for comment.

ICE said in a statement that it was not working with tips from Canary Mission.

Friends said they did not really know how Ozturk came to co-write the essay. They suggested she might have been motivated by her interest in the welfare of children. She was studying child development. “She loves children,” Bilge said. “She cares deeply about children’s rights, women’s rights, animal rights — plant rights!”

The opinion essay says that “credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”

It says the Tufts administration has been “wholly inadequate and dismissive of” demands that the university divest from Israel and acknowledge a genocide of Palestinians.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company