After being abducted and arrested near Boston on Tuesday, Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk has been confirmed to have been transferred to a facility in Louisiana. Meanwhile, several more foreign students in the US with Middle East connections have also been detained, while hundreds of others are facing revocations of their visas.
Following the arrest and detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in plain clothes, earlier this month of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University student, many feared similar arrests would take place, particularly after US President Donald Trump vowed that this would be the first of many to come.
A series of executive orders in January threatens the status of foreign students for engaging in "antisemitism" or for criticising US policy, vague terms that could be used as a pretext for crackdowns.
"The President is nakedly threatening to subject student protestors and others to surveillance, punishment, and deportation for protesting the war crimes of the Israeli government. Those threats come on the heels of a so-called 'national security' executive order, which is peppered with references to ideology, culture, and assimilation—all code for promoting white Christian nationalism," said Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel with the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, in a public statement following the executive orders.
She continued by warning, "While the movement to stop the genocide of Palestinians will certainly be targeted first, it won’t be the last."
This week's detentions appear to be going further than targeting leaders of the pro-Palestinian student movement.
Ozturk was reportedly not active in student protests, and her main action related to Palestinian advocacy seemed to be co-writing an op-ed in her student newspaper.
Another Columbia student, Yunseo Chung, 21, a Korean citizen with a green card who had grown up in the US, is currently fighting a deportation order to send her back to a country she hasn't known since she was seven. She participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but was not considered a leader.
In an even more startling detention this week, Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama with no known history of political advocacy, was arrested and detained, reportedly in-state. Some are wondering if he was only targeted for being from Iran.
Last week, Badar Khan Suri, a doctoral student at Georgetown University who is married to a Palestinian, was arrested and is being held at a facility in Louisiana. The state has one of the lowest rates of legal representation for inmates and has faced criticism for its facilities' human rights conditions.
Also, last week, Cornell University student Momodou Taal, a British national whose background is Gambian, was asked to turn himself in to authorities and was told his visa was being revoked. There have been reported sightings of ICE officials looking for him outside his home.
Based on video footage of some of the more high-profile arrests, the officers were dressed in plain clothes, though they were believed to be with ICE.
This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that at least 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked.
"It might be 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 at a press conference while travelling in Guyana on Thursday.
Rubio appeared to be referring to students who have advocated for Palestinian human rights, which they have the right to do under the First Amendment. So far, judges have been able to block deportations in the latest high-profile cases.
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