US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, defended on Thursday the withdrawal of the visa for the Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested on Tuesday in the street by a group of hooded immigration agents for publishing an op-ed criticising Israel: events that have sparked many protests in the United States calling for her release as well as a strong condemnation from Turkey, which has described the young woman’s arrest ‘simply for supporting Palestine’ as ‘unacceptable.’
‘We revoked her visa,’ Rubio said from Guyana in statements picked up by the US press media, in which he defended the decision to withdraw Öztürk’s F1 visa that allowed her to study in the United States. ’We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campus. We’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that we’re going to take it away… We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,’ Rubio said.
‘If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa,’ Rubio insisted.
‘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sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa‘, added Rubio, who also confirmed that his department has already withdrawn the visas of more than 300 people. ’We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,’ he said.
Rümeysa Öztürk is still in custody without evidence
Despite these accusations, neither Rubio nor the US authorities have so far provided any proof or evidence that Öztürk participated in any of these activities, beyond writing an opinion article in the newspaper of the Tufts University, where she was studying, calling on the university to recognise the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and to support the boycott against companies that support Israel.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had previously stated – again without providing any details – that the young student, who remains detained at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Centre (ICE) in Louisiana, was accused of being ‘engaged in activities in support of Hamas’, accusations that both Öztürk’s family and her lawyer have categorically denied. Öztürk’s supporters, who have been demonstrating in recent days around Massachusetts’ Tufts University, claim that her controversial arrest came about because a well-known pro-Israel website, Canary Mission, accused her simply for her op-ed criticising Israel.
Controversial arrest video has gone viral
Öztürk was arrested and forcibly escorted away by masked federal immigration agents on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after leaving her home in the town of Somerville. No formal charges have been filed against her, while the video of the arrest has gone viral and sparked widespread criticism from human rights advocates in the US and abroad.
The well-known Democratic senator Bernie Sanders criticised the arrest and the revocation of Öztürk’s visa, accusing Rubio and the Trump administration of authoritarianism: ‘A Turkish student at Tufts Univ. was snatched by a group of masked DHS agents. Why? She wrote an op-ed critical of Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. Together, we must stop Trump‘s political persecution of dissidents,’ Sanders wrote on X.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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