Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday that he revoked a Tufts University doctoral student’s visa before she was arrested and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. It was one of at least 300 visas he said he’s canceled.
Speaking with reporters in Guyana, Rubio defended the detention of university students across the country who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. He said federal authorities do it “every day.”
“Every time I find one of these lunatics I take away their visa,” Rubio said.
Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk was stopped, handcuffed and placed into an unmarked SUV by what appeared to be six masked immigration enforcement agents in plainclothes, according to surveillance footage captured by a neighbor’s security camera Tuesday.
Ozturk, a Turkish national studying at Tufts on an F-1 visa, is being held at the South Louisiana Processing Center, according to an online ICE detainee locator.
Rubio spoke broadly about university students vandalizing buildings and harassing students, but did not back up those claims with concrete examples or offer specifics in regards to Ozturk’s case.
“If you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not gonna do it in our country,” Rubio said.
In a statement sent Wednesday, a senior spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said investigations by DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” but did not offer evidence to corroborate that claim.
Federal Judge Denise Casper on Wednesday ordered Ozturk remain in Massachusetts, but prosecutors said she had already been sent to Louisiana by the time that ruling was issued.
Casper further ordered the government to provide Ozturk access to her attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, on Wednesday evening. Khanbabai had said that she did not know where Ozturk was, and that she had been detained without access to her asthma medication.
The government’s response said Ozturk spoke to her attorney Wednesday night.
WBUR has reached out to Khanbabai for comment.
The Tufts graduate student union — of which Ozturk was a part of — denounced her detention as an effort by DHS to “stifle speech by immigrants who express views that Donald Trump and his surrogates simply don’t like.
“This attack puts us further down a path where anyone could be prevented from speaking if the Trump administration strips them of their right to stay in this country,” the group said in a statement issued Wednesday.
Ozturk co-authored a 2024 opinion piece published in the Tufts student newspaper that criticized the university’s response to student efforts demanding the school disclose and sever its relationships with companies that held ties to Israel. In February, she was added to the Canary Mission list — an anonymously-operated website that compiles and publishes personal information of students, professors and others in the U.S. the website considers to be anti-Israel or antisemitic. Other students targeted by DHS have also appeared on the list.
Jennifer Ruth Hoyden, a doctoral student in New York, said she’s known Ozturk since 2019. They met at Teachers’ College, Columbia University, and have been friends since.
Hoyden described her friend as a compassionate, soft-spoken and gentle person who is devoted to working with children. Ozturk is a Fulbright scholar in the process of obtaining a doctorate degree in Child Study and Human Development from Tufts, according to her LinkedIn profile.
“ She’s never uttered an expletive. She is a devoted and peaceful Muslim. She’s super kind,” Hoyden said. “And people should just be so lucky to know anyone like her.”
Hoyden said she learned Ozturk had been detained after a friend sent her the video.
“ I knew it was Rumeysa before I read anything, the minute I saw the video,” Hoyden said. “Just seeing her standing there in her very almost timid, quiet way. I knew it was her.”
The last time she heard from her friend was a few weeks ago. She sent her a text wishing her a happy Ramadan, and they celebrated a mutual friend’s new baby.
“It’s one thing to read about it and be upset or be discouraged or alarmed when you read the news and it’s someone you don’t know,” she said. “But when it happens to someone who you do know and who you care very much about and who you know in every fiber of your being is a wonderful person, that, rightly or wrongly, is very different.”
This article was originally published on March 27, 2025.
