On March 9, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, sent an anxious text message to Najiba Akbar, the university’s former Muslim chaplain, with whom she had become close.
“I recently learned that someone added all my information to a doxxing website called Canary Mission because of the op-ed published last March,” Ms. Ozturk wrote. She was trying to figure out what to do about it.
The website published her résumé and a picture of her in a red head scarf, and claimed that she had “engaged in anti-Israel activism.” It also linked to an opinion essay she had written with three other students in the Tufts student newspaper, critical of the university for not sanctioning Israel over the war in Gaza.
Ms. Ozturk had never struck the chaplain as the activist type, or the face of a movement. She was more of an introvert, the kind of person who liked to be helpful and would stay late after activities at the university’s Interfaith Center to help clean up.
So Ms. Akbar was shocked this week when she heard that the government had revoked Ms. Ozturk’s visa.
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations had concluded that Ms. Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” according to a statement from homeland security.
At a news conference this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about her detention. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” he said, “not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Her friends and professors said that characterization did not square with what they knew of Ms. Ozturk. “It doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Ms. Akbar said. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”
Ms. Ozturk is one of many international students whom the government is seeking to deport after President Trump promised to combat antisemitism on campus and punish student protesters for misbehaving. Her detention suggests that the government is casting a wide net, finding not just prominent protesters who pushed limits and broke rules, but also apparently some who were more quietly involved.
The American Civil Liberties Union signed onto the case Friday and filed court papers demanding her release from custody, arguing that detaining her is a violation of her First Amendment rights, which extend to noncitizens on American soil.
“Rumeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others,” the complaint said. Her lawyers filed the complaint in federal court in Boston, naming as defendants President Trump; Mr. Rubio; Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and immigration officials.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled that she could not be moved out of the country until the court rules again.
Ms. Ozturk has not been charged with any crime, and her friends are at a loss to understand how the law-abiding, introspective student they know matches the portrait of a political activist being presented by the government.
“She doesn’t drive, but if she were to drive she wouldn’t even have a parking ticket,” Reyyan Bilge, a psychology professor at Northeastern, said. “That’s the kind of person we’re talking about.”
Her friends also say that they had never seen any signs that Ms. Ozturk was antisemitic.
“This is not fighting antisemitism; it’s hurting your cause as well,” said Dr. Bilge, who taught Ms. Ozturk at Istanbul Sehir University in Turkey. Dr. Bilge wrote a recommendation for Ms. Ozturk for the Fulbright scholarship that brought her to the United States. She received her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.
A surveillance camera captured Ms. Ozturk’s arrest on Tuesday evening. It has received millions of views and stirred widespread outrage on social media. The video shows federal agents in plainclothes and face masks surrounding her on the sidewalk. They take her phone and her backpack, handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked car.
Ms. Ozturk was talking on her cellphone to her mother in Turkey when the ICE agents surrounded her, Dr. Bilge said, adding, “She told her mom to call her best friend” in Boston.
Her lawyer was not able to find her or to communicate with her for nearly 24 hours after she was detained, according to court papers. In the meantime, the documents say, she was without her asthma medication and suffered an asthma attack while en route to a detention center in Louisiana.
Another of her Turkish professors, Mehmet Fatih Uslu, recalled that her undergraduate thesis was impressive and reflected a sensitive nature. It focused on the representation of death in children’s literature.
“The idea that she would support any form of violence is utterly inconceivable,” he said. “Allegations linking her to Hamas are entirely unfounded and absurd.”
The group that cited her opinion essay, Canary Mission, says its goal is to document “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” But pro-Palestinian students say it has exposed their personal information online so they can be harassed. The group does not list employees or its funding sources on its website, and it did not immediately return a request for comment.
ICE said in a statement that it was not working with tips from Canary Mission.
Friends said they did not really know how Ms. Ozturk came to co-write the essay. They suggested she might have been motivated by her interest in the welfare of children. She was studying child development. “She loves children,” Dr. Bilge said. “She cares deeply about children’s rights, women’s rights, animal rights — plant rights!”
The opinion essay says that “credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
It says the Tufts administration has been “wholly inadequate and dismissive of” demands that the university divest from Israel and acknowledge a genocide of Palestinians.
Ms. Akbar, the former chaplain, said Ms. Ozturk had been wanting to organize an event about how children are affected by violence, and how to support them through it. “I think she was inspired by Gaza, and wanted to broaden it out to Ukraine” and other countries, she said.
Dr. Bilge was having the Ramadan predawn meal with her family at around 5 a.m. when she found out about Ms. Ozturk’s detention. She recalled her phone being filled with messages of people reaching out to her, from both the United States and Turkey, asking if she had heard the news.
“Thinking ‘Rumeysa’ and ‘being detained’ within the same sentence, same paragraph, it was unbelievable,” she said.
Dr. Bilge said that before this week, she was not aware of the essay. But she said she would have fully supported it because the tone of the writing was “peaceful” and “grounded in the values of academic inquiry.”
She said that friends of hers abroad were already reconsidering whether to cancel trips for conferences in the United States. “Why would you go through that stress of thinking you could be detained at any point?” she said.
Ang Li contributed reporting.
