Rubio says US may have revoked more than 300 ‘lunatic’ visas

GEORGETOWN – US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on March 27 said the State Department may have revoked more than 300 visas and warned the Trump administration was looking every day for “these lunatics” after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.

Mr Rubio’s comments were in response to a question about

Ms Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student who was detained

on the evening of March 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, by masked and plain-clothes agents.

Her detention was the latest Trump administration action against a foreign student who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza.

“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I take away their visas,” Mr Rubio said, at a press conference in Guyana, without elaborating on whose visas had been revoked.

“At some point, I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”

The top US diplomat confirmed the US State Department revoked Ms Ozturk’s visa but did not address details when asked what specific actions she had taken that merited such a move.

Mr Rubio said Washington would take away any visa that has been previously issued if students would participate in actions such as “vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus”.

He did not say whether Ms Ozturk participated in those activities.

Ms Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and student in Tufts’ doctoral programme for Child Study and Human Development, had been in the country on an F-1 visa to study.

Her arrest came a year after Ms Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticised Massachusetts-based Tufts’ response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.

Following Ms Ozturk’s arrest, her lawyer filed a lawsuit arguing her detention was unlawful.

While a federal judge in Boston on March 25 night ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to not move Ms Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice, the US Department of Justice in a filing on March 27 said that she was now in Louisiana and had been detained outside of Massachusetts at the time the lawsuit was filed.

Ms Mahsa Khanbabai, her lawyer, in a statement late on March 26 called the claims against her client “baseless” and noted she had not been accused of any crime.

“It appears the only thing she is being targeted for is her right to free speech,” Ms Khanbabai said.

Ms Ozturk’s supporters say her detention is the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student engaged in such activism to be carried out by Mr Trump’s administration, which has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are legally in the US and have been

involved in pro-Palestinian protests.

The actions have been condemned as an assault on free speech, though the Trump administration argues that certain protests are anti-Semitic and can undermine US foreign policy.

“The people that we’re getting rid of in our country are vandalising, they’re not protesters. They’re taking over college campuses. They’re harassing fellow students. They’re not demonstrating, they’re going beyond demonstration,” Mr Rubio said later on March 27 at a press conference in Suriname.

“We want them out. Every one of them I find, we’re going to kick them out.” REUTERS