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, who faces deportation after she helped write an essay critical of Israel.
The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Mass., San Francisco and the Upper West Side of New York, along with J-Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group. On Thursday, they filed a brief in federal court in Burlington, Vt., objecting to the tactics the government was using against Ms. 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, Mass.
“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Anecdotally, the visas have typically been revoked with little or no notice and without telling the students what they might have done wrong.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.
Ms. Ozturk’s detention followed the arrest two weeks earlier of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was a spokesman for pro-Palestinian protesters.
An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mr. Khalil. But he is still challenging the case in a separate court. In response to his case, the Boston chapter of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff wrote an open letter, titled “Not in Our Name,” that has been signed by nearly 3,000 faculty and staff members and students at universities across the United States.
“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 Ms. 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, Mass., 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 Ms. 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 Gaza as a genocide.
“I don’t like her statements — I think they’re wrong,” Rabbi Bauer said. But, he added, he believes in free speech, and “the beauty of America is that we don’t all agree with each other.”
He said he felt so strongly that Ms. Ozturk’s detention violated Jewish values that he talked about it in a recent sermon.
“When you see the floor fall out from under her, it’s naïve to think that those cracks won’t eventually reach our feet,” he said.
A federal judge in Vermont, where Ms. Ozturk spent a night in custody before being sent to Louisiana, is scheduled to hear her habeas corpus petition for release from detention on Monday.
Dana Goldstein and Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/us/jewish-groups-synagogues-ice-student-detentions.html
