ISTANBUL
A US Homeland Security agent testified Tuesday that he was instructed not to inform a Turkish doctoral student who was detained by immigration agents this March that her visa had been revoked.
“It was the determination made that she would not be” made aware “that her visa had been revoked. We did not plan on alerting her,” Patrick Cunningham testified in federal court.
In the case of Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student, her visa was revoked without notice after she co-authored an op-ed in support of Palestine. Controversially, starting this year the Trump administration began a crackdown on foreign students with legal visas over expressing support for Palestine, despite their constitutional right to free speech.
Ozturk was snatched off the streets by masked agents and put into a van, and soon flown from her residence in Massachusetts to a detention center in the southern state of Louisiana, thousands of miles away.
The operation “developed pretty quickly,” Cunningham also said, adding: “We made it a priority.”
Homeland Security Investigations, his division, was not normally involved in most immigration-related cases, but instead mainly dealt with drug, financial and other crimes. But Ozturk was prioritized for detention and deportation for writing an op-ed.
“I can’t recall a time that it's come top down like this with a visa revocation,” he said, explaining how the US State Department issued the orders.
Cunningham testified that upon receiving the department’s order to arrest Ozturk due to her revoked visa, he consulted Homeland Security lawyers to ensure the arrest was lawful.
He also said that in the months following US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, HSI increasingly prioritized immigration arrests, adding that “the prioritization of that work has certainly increased.”
Ozturk’s attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, told CNN that the “silent revocation” is a misuse of immigration laws aimed at targeting individuals for exercising their constitutional rights, adding that it is not about immigration enforcement but rather retaliation against protected speech.
In the past, people whose US visas were revoked were informed and given a fair chance to challenge the ruling.
A federal judge in the US state of Vermont ordered her release on bail in May, saying that the government has produced "no evidence" for her detention other than her writing an op-ed.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump vowed to crack down on “the worst of the worst,” hardened criminals and gang members who were in the US illegally, but statistics show most of the people being rounded up for deportation have no criminal record or cases pending against them.