Rabia Iclal Turan
14 April 2025•Update: 14 April 2025
WASHINGTON
The US State Department has found no evidence that Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, engaged in antisemitic activity or supported a terrorist organization, according to a report Sunday.
The Washington Post said a March memo from within the State Department concluded there were no grounds to revoke Ozturk’s visa based on the Trump administration's claim that she supported the Palestinian group Hamas or engaged in antisemitism or violence as alleged by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The memo, described to the Post by anonymous sources, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio lacked sufficient grounds to revoke Ozturk’s visa under a provision that allows him to act in defense of the country’s foreign policy interests.
Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD student in child and human development at Tufts, was detained by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside her Somerville apartment. Her detention followed an 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 criticizing the university’s response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians.
The memo from DHS, sent by senior official Andre Watson to a State Department counterpart, said that “Ozturk engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”
Specifically, the memo said she “co-authored an op-ed article” that “called for Tufts to ‘disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.’”
According to a copy of a separate memo reviewed by the Post, DHS had recommended Ozturk’s visa be revoked under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that requires the secretary of state to have “reasonable grounds” to believe someone’s presence poses an “adverse policy consequence for the United States.”
The memo noted that no US government databases showed any terrorism-related information about Ozturk. A separate internal document also stated that the visa revocation would be “silent,” meaning she would not be informed in advance.
The State Department did not immediately respond to Anadolu's request for comment. When asked during a daily press briefing in March, department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said she could not discuss “something that's in the courts, that's being adjudicated.”
“DHS clearly felt that she had committed crimes that required her detention,” Bruce added, without elaborating or providing evidence.
A viral video captured the moments Ozturk was detained, showing masked ICE agents handcuffing her and forcibly taking away her phone.
Ozturk’s detention comes amid the Trump administration's broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian students and academics, including the detention of Palestinian activist and recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri.
