Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now plainly saying that President Donald Trump's administration is targeting immigrants for detention and deportation if they support the wrong causes.
In the wake of this week's arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumesya Ozturk (who was in the United States legally on an F-1 visa until it was revoked), mass protests have been taking place in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Somerville, attracting thousands of supporters. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed last year in the Tufts Daily calling on her school to divest its endowment from Israel due to its killing of Palestinian civilians.
Ozturk was on her way to meet friends to break her Ramadan fast when multiple masked agents with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apprehended her on the sidewalk and put her in an unmarked vehicle. She's now in federal custody in Louisiana awaiting deportation proceedings despite a judge ordering the administration to keep her in Massachusetts.
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ABC News reported Thursday that Rubio defended the administration's detention of Ozturk and other noncitizens by arguing he had the absolute right to revoke any visa for any immigrant — even if only for their political speech.
"It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa," Rubio said during a Thursday press conference. "If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus -- we're not going to give you a visa."
"If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States, and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we're going to take away your visa," he added. "And once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it's just that simple."
Ozturk is just the latest noncitizen to be singled out by the Trump administration for deportation due to her pro-Palestinian activism. Her arrest comes on the heels of the DHS arresting Dr. Badar Khan Suri — a postgraduate student at Georgetown University who was in the U.S. legally on a student visa — at his Virginia home last week. Suri's attorney argued his arrest was due to his activism for pro-Palestinian causes. Trump's DHS also recently arrested 21 year-old green card holder and Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, who has been in the U.S. since she was seven years old. Assistant U.S. attorney Perry Carbone said the administration aimed to revoke her legal permanent residency "due to the situation with the protesting."
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The Trump administration is also attempting to deport Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was a central figure in last year's pro-Palestine protests on the Ivy League school's campus. Khalil, who is married to a U.S. citizen, was arrested and placed in deportation proceedings without being formally charged with a crime. The administration has argued that it has the right to do so under a statute that deems any noncitizen whose presence could present a threat to a president's foreign policy can be deported. Khalil's attorney counters that his client's potential deportation is in retaliation for his activism.
Former American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen told Reason magazine earlier this month that while noncitizens — including undocumented immigrants — have the same First Amendment rights as citizens with regard to civil and criminal issues, those rights are less clear when it pertains to the deportation process. According to the New York Times' German Lopez: "The federal government has nearly absolute power over immigration, including its ability to deport noncitizens; it gets to decide who comes and then stays in this country, potentially at the expense of constitutional rights."
Senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller said last year that he aimed to ramp up deportation of immigrants based on their political views. During a speech to National Rifle Association activists in February of 2024, he said the second Trump administration would target "people who were let in on visas but whose views, attitudes, and beliefs make them ineligible to stay in the country." Trump also told campaign donors during a May 2024 meeting that he would prioritize the deportation of immigrants who protested for pro-Palestinian causes. And the Washington Post reported this week that the Trump administration is now ordering colleges to give them the names and nationalities of noncitizen student protesters.
"One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country," Trump said. "You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave."
Click here to read ABC's full report.