Plainclothes federal agents arrest Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk on street
Plainclothes Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk on a Somerville, Massachusetts sidewalk on March 25, 2025 and transferred her to an ICE facility in Louisiana. Her visa had been revoked in connection with an op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper about Israel-Gaza.
On March 25, 2025, plainclothes federal agents stopped Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University's Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts. Surveillance video showed agents in masks and hoodies handcuffing her and placing her into an unmarked SUV. She was transferred within days to an ICE detention facility in Basile, Louisiana. The State Department had revoked her F-1 student visa; the government's filings cited a March 2024 op-ed she co-authored in The Tufts Daily that criticized the university's response to Israel's war in Gaza. Federal judges in Massachusetts and Vermont issued orders concerning her detention and habeas petition. The arrest drew condemnation from Tufts' president and First Amendment scholars.