Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Rumeysa Ozturk’s visa was terminated due to disruptive protest behavior. He did not cite evidence.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Rumeysa Ozturk’s visa was terminated due to disruptive protest behavior. He did not cite evidence.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Thursday that the federal government had revoked the visa of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was detained by ICE agents in Somerville earlier this week. The US has revoked more than 300 visas, Rubio told reporters at a press conference in Guyana.
Rubio defended Ozturk’s detention and the termination of her visa. He argued that US officials have a responsibility to take those actions against people that come into the country to cause chaos and commit crimes like vandalism on university campuses.
Ozturk, a Turkish national, co-authored an op-ed that appeared in The Tufts Daily last March where she identified as a “graduate student for Palestine.” In that piece, she called on Tufts officials to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and to divest from Israel.
The Tufts campus in Medford saw significant protest activity last spring, as students set up an encampment to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the school’s purported connections to Israel.
