On Tuesday, US authorities detained and revoked the student visa of Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who had voiced her support for Palestinians affected by the Gaza war.
Ozturk’s arrest is the latest instance of President Donald Trump’s administration acting against international college students over their support for Palestinians during the Gaza solidarity encampments that erupted across university campuses last year. Students who protested for Palestine are having their legal visas and residence status revoked and are being arrested and detained.
Here is more about the US university students who have been detained so far:
Why does Trump want to deport US students?
The Trump administration alleges that the students who participated in pro-Palestine protests spread anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus — a claim students, lawyers and activists have all rebutted. Jewish activists and groups have been at the forefront of many of the most prominent protests in the US against the Gaza war.
On January 29, Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”, in which he ordered the head of each executive department or agency to submit a report within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities and actions available for fighting anti-Semitism.
The White House published a fact sheet a day after this order. In the fact sheet, Trump said: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
His administration has since targeted multiple international students and scholars in the US.
Rumeysa Ozturk
Security camera footage from Tuesday evening shows six individuals in plainclothes taking Ozturk into custody near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Some of these officers were partially covering their faces. Ozturk had headed out alone to meet her friends for Iftar, the evening meal to break her Ramadan fast.
The 30-year-old is a Turkish national and a Fulbright Scholar in Tufts’ doctoral programme for Child Study and Human Development. She has been in the US on a valid student visa.
On March 26, 2024, Ozturk co-wrote an opinion piece for her university’s student news website, the Tufts Daily, with four other students. In this piece, the authors criticised the institute’s President Sunil Kumar, who sent an email dismissing resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate, which called for the university to divest from companies linked to Israel and “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.
Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, filed a petition in Boston federal court late on Tuesday, arguing that Ozturk had been unlawfully detained. As a result, US District Judge Indira Talwani ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice.
Despite this, Ozturk was moved to Louisiana by Wednesday night, according to her lawyer.
US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an X post on Wednesday: “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” McLaughlin did not specify what these activities were.
“A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security,” McLaughlin wrote.
“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her. No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of,” Khanbabai said in a statement.
Tufts University President Sunil Kumar said in a written statement that the university was not informed before this arrest. “From what we have been told subsequently, the student’s visa status has been terminated, and we seek to confirm whether that information is true,” Kumar said.
The video of Ozturk’s arrest was captured on 32-year-old software engineer Michael Mathis’s security camera. “It looked like a kidnapping,” he said, according to a report by AP. “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”
On Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered in Somerville to protest the arrest of Ozturk, demanding her release.
Standing with thousands of Somerville residents to denounce the sickening, unlawful abduction of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk by masked federal agents last night. We need to bring Rumeysa home and organize a coordinated defense of our immigrant neighbors and our rights. pic.twitter.com/LSGLLlraIi
— Mike Connolly (@MikeConnollyMA) March 27, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil
On March 8, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who was the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) during the campus protests last year. He was taken from his university-owned New York City apartment while his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, recorded the arrest on her phone. This marked the first publicly known student deportation effort of its kind under the Trump administration.
McLaughlin alleged Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” but no evidence for this was provided. Abdalla said that the agents did not show a warrant while making the arrest. Khalil was transferred to an ICE processing facility in Jena, Louisiana.
At the time of arrest, Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card. When the ICE agents were told that Khalil had a green card, they said that this would be revoked. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted the link to a news article about Khalil’s arrest, captioning it “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
On March 10, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University.” Trump added that Khalil’s arrest was the first of many. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” Trump wrote, without offering any evidence to back his accusations against Khalil.
Khalil, 30, was an Algerian citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. He arrived at Columbia in January 2023 to pursue his Master’s degree in public administration. Khalil was among a small group of students who organised the first campus protest on October 12, 2024, five days after Israel’s war on Gaza broke out.
Amid the protests, Khalil was briefly suspended by Columbia, but reinstated after the university found no grounds for suspension. At the time, Khalil told the BBC that while he was a lead negotiator, he did not participate in the encampments, fearing he would lose his F-1 student visa.
It is unclear when he received his green card, but his wife, Abdalla, is a US citizen.
“The government’s unlawful policy of targeting noncitizens for arrest and removal based on protected speech is … viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” Khalil’s lawyers, led by Amy Belsher, wrote in a court filing on March 13.
Badar Khan Suri
Indian national Badar Khan Suri was arrested on the evening of March 17 at his home in northern Virginia. Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He had been in Virginia for three years and held a valid US student visa at the time of arrest.
Georgetown University said in a written statement: “We are not aware of [Suri] engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention.”
McLaughlin attributed Suri’s arrest to his “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism”. She wrote on X: “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”
Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is an American citizen, she confirmed to Al Jazeera. In a post on X on February 13, the Israeli embassy in the US said that Saleh was the daughter of a senior Hamas adviser. Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, confirmed to The New York Times that he is Suri’s father-in-law.
However, the Trump administration has yet to make public any evidence that Suri had spread Hamas propaganda or promoted anti-Semitism.
On March 20, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia Court halted Suri’s deportation. According to the ICE website, Suri is currently being held in the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.
Yunseo Chung
Yunseo Chung, 21, is a Korean-American Columbia student and permanent resident of the US and has lived in the US since she was seven. Chung was one of the several students arrested for participating in a pro-Palestine protest on March 5 this year at Barnard College, a Columbia-affiliated undergraduate college.
On Monday, she sued the Trump administration in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to avoid being deported.
Her legal team was informed early this month that her permanent residence was being revoked, according to the court filing. The lawsuit says that immigration authorities issued an administrative arrest warrant for Chung on March 8.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald temporarily halted her deportation. “As of today, Yunseo Chung no longer has to fear and live in fear of ICE coming to her doorstep and abducting her in the night,” Chung’s lawyer Ramzi Kassem said after the ruling.
Momodou Taal
Momodou Taal is a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and The Gambia. He participated in pro-Palestine protests last year, where he called on Cornell to divest from companies that sell weapons to Israel. Taal was suspended from Cornell twice last year for his participation in protest activities and encampment.
Taal told Al Jazeera that he filed a lawsuit on March 8 alongside two other plaintiffs — a doctoral candidate and Cornell professor who are both US citizens — after Khalil was arrested, against two Trump executive orders, including the one focused on university campuses.
On the morning of March 19, a day after a federal judge scheduled a hearing for Taal’s lawsuit, Taal posted a written statement on X that “unidentified law enforcement” came to his home in Ithaca, New York. He added that later in the day, Cornell students saw additional law enforcement cars positioned at different spots near his residence, including on campus.
Citing the example of Ozturk’s arrest, Taal said that there seems to be an emerging pattern, “You are surveilled for a few days and then they pounce essentially to abduct you and kidnap you at some point.”
Taal said his visa was revoked on March 14.
Alireza Doroudi
Alireza Doroudi, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama, was detained by ICE agents early on Tuesday, the university’s student news website, The Crimson White, reported. While the ICE website says that an Iranian individual named Alireza Doroudi is in ICE custody, it does not specify where he is being detained.
Doroudi was from Iran and obtained an F-1 student visa from the US embassy in Oman in January 2023. His visa was revoked six months after his arrival in the US, The Crimson White reported, citing a group chat that included Iranian students. It is unclear whether he was arrested for overstaying a visa.
University spokesperson Alex House said that, while international students are valued members of the campus community, the university “has and will continue to follow all immigration laws and cooperate with federal authorities.”
Ranjani Srinivasan
Ranjani Srinivasan, 37, had her student visa revoked by the US Department of State on the night of March 5. She learned about this through an email from the US consulate in Chennai, the southern Indian state where she is originally from. She had been a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia University for five years and held a valid visa until 2029.
On March 7, individuals claiming to be immigration agents came knocking on Srinivasan’s university residential housing flat that she had lived in since 2021. The individuals said that they planned to put Srinivasan through proceedings to remove her from the US, before eventually leaving.
After this, Srinivasan left her flat for a location she did not disclose in communication with Al Jazeera. A day after this, Khalil was arrested. “That’s when I realised I have no rights in this system at all. It was only a matter of time before they caught hold of me,” Srinivasan told Al Jazeera. “What truly unsettled me was that Columbia already knew ICE was operating on campus – yet seemed uninterested in intervening and even appeared to be colluding with them before Mahmoud disappeared.”
On March 9, Columbia unenrolled Srinivasan as a student. By March 11, Srinivasan flew out of New York to Canada on a visitor visa to stay with her family and friends. Her lawyers informed ICE that Srinivasan had departed from the US.
On March 14, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on her X account showing security camera footage of Srinivasan at New York’s LaGuardia airport, elated about “one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers” leaving on their own.
Srinivasan was stunned at the accusation. “If supporting the idea of human rights or ending a genocide is equated with supporting Hamas, then anyone in proximity to me – without me having done anything – can just be picked up and made an example of,” she told Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/27/who-are-the-students-trump-wants-to-deport?traffic_source=rss
