Defending Student Deportations, Marco Rubio Equates Writing an Anti-Israel Op-Ed With Starting a Riot

The detention of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk illustrates the startling breadth of the authority the secretary of state is invoking.

President Donald Trump says he is determined to deport "terrorist sympathizers," including legal permanent residents as well as foreigners with student visas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the targets have a history of "tearing things up" on "our university campuses" by starting riots, taking over buildings, and harassing people.

While those descriptions seem accurate as applied to at least some of the foreign students whom Rubio wants to expel, they are less apt in other cases. Contrary to the way Trump and Rubio portray this initiative, neither rhetorical support for terrorism nor disruptive conduct is necessary to invoke the sweeping legal authority on which they are relying, which applies to any noncitizen whose "presence or activities" Rubio thinks could have "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences."

The contrast between Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian graduate student at Cornell University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, illustrates the startling breadth of that provision. Taal, who is challenging his deportation and so far has avoided detention, has explicitly endorsed terrorism as a form of justifiable "resistance" and has engaged in disruptive protests. But neither seems to be true of Ozturk, who was arrested last week on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked immigration agents and is being held at a detention center in Louisiana.

On the day of the barbaric attack that set off the war in Gaza, Taal offered a take that was shockingly common among campus protesters who blamed Israeli policy for the Hamas invasion. "Wherever you have oppression, you will find those who [are] fighting against it," Taal wrote on X. "Glory to the Resistance!" Two days later, he reiterated that "colonised peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary."

Last year, Taal was suspended twice because of his involvement in disruptive protest activities at Cornell: a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Arts Quad and the forcible invasion of a career fair at Statler Hall. After the second suspension, Taal said he was "effectively being deported." But he was ultimately allowed to continue working on a Ph.D. in Africana studies, albeit remotely.

Ozturk's main offense, by contrast, seems to be co-authoring a March 2024 op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily. The essay, which was co-written by three other graduate students, criticized Tufts President Sunil Kumar's "wholly inadequate and dismissive" response to three anti-Israel resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate. The resolutions demanded that the university "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide," stop the sale of Sabra products in Tufts dining facilities, and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. A fourth resolution, which failed on a tie vote, would have demanded an end to study-abroad programs at Israeli universities.

Those resolutions "disappointed" Kumar, who explained his position in a message to Tufts students, faculty, and staff:

As we have done in the past, we reject the Boycott Divestment Sanctions [BDS] movement, we wholeheartedly support academic freedom and all our academic and exchange programs, and we will continue to work with all companies that we engage with and do business with now. These resolutions, which mirror others being promoted by student groups at universities and colleges nationwide, do not promote nuanced understanding through broader dialogue. The immense loss of life in Gaza is tragic. We mourn with the Palestinians, but we also feel for the Israelis grieving over those they have lost and share their desire for the safe return of the hostages. It is possible to hold both of these views simultaneously. It is also possible for us to be supportive of both the right of Israel to exist and for the self-determination rights of the Palestinian people. However, these resolutions do not allow for these views to coexist and, as a result, force our community into opposing groups rather than uniting us to build from areas of agreement.

Ozturk was dismayed by Kumar's dismay. "These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law," she and her co-authors wrote. "Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide."

Ozturk, in short, is on record as a supporter of the BDS movement, which offends many people for the reasons Kumar laid out, and as a polemicist who recognizes no meaningful distinction between "genocide" and a war of self-defense that kills innocent people. In those respects, she resembles many left-leaning students at universities across the country. But aside from that tendentious essay, Ozturk does not seem to have done much that could be characterized as harmful to U.S. interests, let alone violated university rules or the rights of other people at Tufts.

Prior to Ozturk's detention, which prompted a local protest that attracted more than 2,000 supporters last week, her essay about the BDS resolutions was her only appearance in The Tufts Daily. Ozturk's arrest "doesn't really make sense, because she wasn't a figure on campus," Najiba Akbar, a former Muslim chaplain at Tufts, told The New York Times. "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."

The Department of Homeland Security claims Ozturk "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans." It adds that "glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated," which it calls "commonsense security."

When Rubio was asked about Ozturk's detention at a press conference last Thursday, he implied that she was guilty by association. "If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student," he said, and "the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just 'cause you wanna write op-eds, but because you wanna participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we're not gonna give you a visa."

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 gonna take away your visa," Rubio added. "And once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States." It would be "stupid for any country in the world to welcome people" who are "going to your universities to start a riot," "take over a library," or "harass people," he said. But he did not claim Ozturk had done anything like that.

So far, Rubio said, he has revoked about 300 student visas based on foreign policy concerns. "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa," he said. "We're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up….We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses."

That gloss rings true as applied to an activist like Taal, who went beyond praising Hamas (which on its own would be constitutionally protected speech) by engaging in conduct that interfered with other people's use of Cornell facilities, to the point that he was banned from campus. But Rubio's description is more than a little misleading as applied to a student like Ozturk, who seems to have done nothing more than express views that offend Rubio.

According to Rubio, that's enough to make someone "subject to removal" under 8 USC 1227(a)(4)(C)(i). He is probably right about that, which underlines the menace that the provision poses to due process and freedom of speech.

On its face, Section 1227(a)(4)(C)(i) covers any speech related to foreign policy that the secretary of state deems contrary to U.S. interests. Commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one of many possible examples, which could include opinions about the war in Ukraine, the U.S. role in European defense, the merits of Trump's trade war, the U.S. response to human rights abuses in other countries, or literally any other foreign policy issue.

"The range of circumstances that could warrant deportation" under Section 1227(a)(4)(C)(i) is "virtually boundless," Maryanne Trump Barry, the president's sister, noted in a decision she wrote as a federal judge in 1996. The law grants the secretary of state "unrestrained power," she said, "authoriz[ing] a heretofore unknown scope of executive enforcement power vis-a-vis the individual with utterly no standards provided to the Secretary of State or to the legal aliens subject to its provisions." The statute "provides absolutely no notice to aliens as to what is required of them," Barry added, and "represents a breathtaking departure…from well established legislative precedent," which "commands deportation based on adjudications of defined impermissible conduct by the alien in the United States."

Those features, Barry concluded, made Section 1227(a)(4)(C)(i) "unconstitutionally vague." That is especially problematic when it is used to punish people for speech protected by the First Amendment.