Hundreds of people packed the streets around the federal courthouse building in Burlington Monday morning in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student residing in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa who is facing the threat of deportation. Inside the courthouse, Öztürk’s attorneys argued in a hearing lasting almost three hours that she was being unconstitutionally held and must be released.
Last month, Öztürk was seized by six plainclothes ICE agents in a brazen midday attack in Somerville, Massachusetts. She was held in Methuen, then driven to Lebanon, New Hampshire and then to St. Albans, Vermont. She was then flown to a prison in Louisiana, more than a thousand miles from her home and attorneys.
The Department of Homeland Security contends that Öztürk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” yet could not offer evidence to that effect in court. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the State Department could not find grounds for such a claim:
After receiving the recommendation from DHS, the State Department found that while Ozturk had protested Tufts’ relationship with Israel, neither DHS nor ICE nor Homeland Security investigations produced any evidence showing that Ozturk has engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization, according to U.S. government employees briefed on the State Department’s memo.
The memo also said that a search of U.S. government databases on Ozturk did not produce any terrorism-related information about her.
As a result of the lack of evidence, the department said she could be deported using a different authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the revocation of a visa at the secretary of state’s discretion.
Meanwhile, in Colchester, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, was arrested by federal agents of Homeland Security Investigations after entering the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office the same morning. Mahdawi, who has lived in the United States for 10 years and originally hails from the Occupied West Bank, was at the office to ostensibly take his citizenship test. Instead, he is facing deportation. A member of Columbia’s pro-Palestine movement on campus in 2024, Mahdawi is being held in Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans while his case is pending.
His detention, much like that of his Columbia classmate Mahmoud Khalil, uses a once-obscure provision of immigration law to unilaterally strip visa and green card holders of their rights and deport them. The McCarran-Walter Act, officially known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, gives the federal government and Secretary of State wide discretion when it comes to deportation. Many legal experts claim such discretion violates the First Amendment.
After Khalil’s abduction and arrest, Mahdawi, for fear of being picked up by ICE, sheltered in place for more than three weeks, according to The Intercept. However, unlike Khalil and Öztürk, who were taken off the street, Mahdawi’s citizenship test was scheduled at the Colchester USCIS office, where he was taken into custody when he arrived, a familiar tactic of using the ruse of routine appointments to lure migrant workers in Vermont into ICE custody.
Mahdawi’s attorneys have filed a habeas corpus petition and challenged the legality of his detention. He is the ninth Columbia student targeted for deportation by the Trump administration. As a legal resident of the United States, Mahdawi, unlike others, is not facing revocation of a student visa but facing efforts by the government to cancel his green card over pro-Palestine views.
Once again, the small state of Vermont is playing an outsized role in the deployment of institutionalized violence and repression at home and abroad. In South Burlington, fighters in the infamous F-35 fleet are hosted and repaired. In Jericho, the Army Mountain Warfare School trained U.S. troops who invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. In Williston, the central ICE data processing center for the entire country operates in an office park. And, since last August, federal immigration agents have unchecked power to fill all six of Vermont’s prisons with detainees.
Conversely, this also means that the residents of Vermont have the ability to play an outsized role in resisting and dismantling state violence and repression.
An emergency mobilization against Mahdawi’s arrest is planned for tomorrow, April 16th, at 5:00pm in St. Albans at the Northwest State Correctional Facility, where he is currently held.
With additional reporting by Matt Moore.
Patrick is a writer and organizer based in northern Vermont. He is on the editorial collective for The Rake Vermont.
