Rubio's claim about Turkish student Ozturk 'turns out that it's a big lie': US senator

WASHINGTON

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's claim about detained Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk was a "big lie," Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Monday.

"Marco Rubio is not conducting much foreign policy these days, but he has become the guy who disappears foreign students in the United States and even people with green cards, permanent residents for exercising their First Amendment rights," Van Hollen said in a video on X.

His remarks came one day after media reports said the State Department has found no evidence that Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, engaged in antisemitic activity or supported a terror organization.

"And today we read in the story in the Washington Post that an internal State Department memo clearly indicates that in the case of a Fulbright student, Miss Ozturk, that they had no basis at all for claiming she was disrupting US foreign policy or engaging in antisemitic activities, and yet this is the claim that Marco Rubio is making in public. So, it turns out that it's a big lie," said Van Hollen.

The memo, described to the Post by anonymous sources, said Rubio lacked sufficient grounds to revoke Ozturk’s visa under a provision that allows him to act in defense of foreign policy interests.

Ozturk, a PhD student in child and human development at Tufts, was detained by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside her apartment in Somerville. Her detention followed online targeting by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which took aim at her for co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, in March 2024 that criticized the university’s response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 51,000 Palestinians.

"So to Marco Rubio, why don't you stop picking on vulnerable students, and why don't you show up and testify in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, something you have not done since you were confirmed," he added.

The senator stressed that President Donald Trump's plan to remove 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip is "despicable."

"So, if you want to talk about US foreign policy and US foreign policy toward the Netanyahu government, why don't you come to the Foreign Relations Committee, and stop picking on students and disappearing them for exercising their First Amendment rights," he said.

A US federal judge in the state of Vermont said Monday he is weighing whether to release Ozturk and hold a hearing in May as she challenges her detention.