Synagogues, Jewish groups defend detained students

A flier calling for the release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student, and Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, is seen at a crosswalk at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. The New York Times

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By Anemona Hartocollis

The New York Times

They are a group of progressive Jewish organizations and congregations, and they are coming to the defense of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Muslim graduate student at Tufts University, who faces deportation after she helped write an essay critical of Israel.

The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Massachusetts; San Francisco; and the Upper West Side of Manhattan; along with J-Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group. On Thursday, they filed a brief in federal court in Burlington, Vermont, objecting to the tactics the government was using against Ozturk in the name of combating antisemitism.

In the brief, the groups argued she should be released from the Louisiana immigration detention center where she has been held for over two weeks, after masked immigration agents surrounded and arrested her on a street near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts.

“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” the brief says. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of amici’s members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”

There have been reports of almost 1,000 international students and scholars at universities across the country who have lost their legal status since mid-March, according to the Association of International Educators.

Anecdotally, the visas have typically been revoked with little or no notice and without telling the students what they might have done wrong. In some cases, students have committed legal infractions, like speeding or driving while drunk, according to universities and lawyers that are monitoring the revocations. But some have not. If the students do not leave voluntarily, they face deportation.

The Trump administration has defended the campaign, saying it is revoking the visas of students who have broken the law, who have engaged in antisemitic harassment and violence, who pose a threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States, or who are terrorist sympathizers. A few Jewish activists have applauded the effort, echoing the Trump administration’s mantra that “a visa is a privilege, not a right.”

But mainstream Jewish groups have expressed qualms about the crackdown, even while approving of the Trump administration’s focus on antisemitism.

As the number of students the Trump administration is targeting has grown, Jewish groups have said that while they may not like the views of pro-Palestinian students, they cannot condone students’ being swept up for vague reasons, without formal charges against them.

Ozturk’s detention followed the arrest two weeks earlier of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was a spokesperson for pro-Palestinian protesters.

An immigration judge in Louisiana found Friday that the Trump administration could deport Khalil. But he is still challenging the case in a separate court. “We are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name — and cynical claims of antisemitism — to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities,” the letter reads.

Sara Coodin, the director of academic affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said some federal interventions, including congressional investigations of antisemitism on campus, had been “transformative” in forcing universities to confront problems on their campuses.

But she said Ozturk’s case appeared to be “a clear disregard on the part of the federal government for the rights of people on U.S. soil to speak their minds.”

The only evidence that has surfaced against her is an opinion essay she co-wrote that was critical of Israel.

“The idea that someone can be pulled off the street for something they wrote, something they think, really affects as all, and we all need to fight back against that,” said Elaine Landes, a member of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue in West Newton that is one of the parties to the court brief.

“The whole push to fight antisemitism, to me, feels like we’re being used for another agenda, and that is not going to keep our community safe,” she said. “We need to look out for others.”

Ryan Bauer, senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco, another signatory, said he supported Ozturk even though he disagreed with her essay. In it, she pushed for Tufts to end financial ties with Israel and to recognize Israeli conduct in the Gaza Strip as a genocide.