Boston:

A Turkish national who is a doctoral student at Tufts University has been detained by federal agents without explanation, her lawyer said on Wednesday.

[…]

Surveillance video obtained by The Associated Press appears to show six people, their faces covered, taking away Ozturk’s phone as she yelled and was handcuffed.

[…]

“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,” [lawyer Mahsa] Khanbabai said in a statement.

Ozturk has a visa allowing her to study in the United States, Khanbabai said.

Well, that’s messed up, I thought. But I assumed it was just another instance of the Assclown’s long-known racism affecting policy, like his minions’ earlier move to revoke the legal status of thousands of legally resident Hatians. (Some shills have made noises about that quasi-visa program being overused, but the decision to crack down on program users from specific countries shows that they really have a problem with those demographics, not with the program.)

Then the feds’ motive came out, and it was no better:

A senior Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal authorities detained Ozturk after an investigation found she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” The department did not provide evidence of that support.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration has revoked the visas of at least 300 people, including Ozturk: “We do it every day.”

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist, to tear up our university campuses,” Rubio told reporters during a stop in Guyana.

[…]

Friends and colleagues of Ozturk said she was not closely involved in pro-Palestinian protests that broke out on campuses last spring. Her only known activism, they said, was co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper that called on Tufts University to engage with student demands to cut ties with Israel.

So a legal immigrant is looking at being deported to some Trump crony’s shithole prison; if she’s “lucky,” it’ll be her home country, which is run by another Trump crony. And it’s because she asked some university officials to “engage” with protester demands. (…and preferably to accept them, but politely asking for that wouldn’t be a handcuff-worthy offense in a free country, either.)

And Marco Rubio, the only man in America with a dick smaller than Trump’s, says they’ve done it hundreds of times.

To hell with everyone involved in perpetrating this travesty.

 

P.S. I’d love to see a Venn diagram of people who support deporting mild supporters of Palestine and the “Pinochet did nothing wrong” crowd, and I’d love to hear some of those people try to come up with something that sounds like a consistent principle explaining those two beliefs.