Jewish groups and synagogues defend students detained by ICE

WASHINGTON - They are a group of progressive Jewish organisations and congregations, and they are coming to the defence of Ms Rumeysa Ozturk, a Muslim graduate student at Tufts University, who faces deportation after she helped write an essay critical of Israel.

The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Massachusetts; San Francisco; and the Upper West Side of Manhattan; along with J-Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group.

On April 10, they filed a brief in federal court in Burlington, Vermont, objecting to the tactics the government was using against Ms Ozturk in the name of combating anti-Semitism.

In the brief, the groups argued she should be released from the Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centre where she has been held for more than two weeks, after masked immigration agents arrested her near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts.

“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” the brief says. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in 21st-century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of amici’s members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”

There have been reports of almost 1,000 international students and scholars at universities across the country who have lost their legal status since mid-March.

Anecdotally, the visas have typically been revoked with little or no notice and without telling the students what they might have done wrong. In some cases, students have committed legal infractions, like speeding or driving while drunk. But some have not.

The Trump administration has defended the campaign, saying it is revoking the visas of students who have broken the law, who have engaged in anti-Semitic harassment and violence, who pose a threat to the foreign policy interests of the US, or who are terrorist sympathisers. A few Jewish activists have applauded the effort, echoing the Trump administration’s mantra that “a visa is a privilege, not a right”.

But mainstream Jewish groups have expressed qualms about the crackdown, even while approving of the Trump administration’s focus on anti-Semitism. They have said that while they may not like the views of pro-Palestinian students, they cannot condone students’ being swept up for vague reasons, without formal charges against them.

“The idea that someone can be pulled off the street for something they wrote, something they think, really affects as all, and we all need to fight back against that,” said Ms Elaine Landes, a member of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue in West Newton that is one of the parties to the court brief. NYTIMES