The Op-Ed Arrest
The government's own documents show they had no evidence for the terrorism support they claimed.
In March 2025 A Turkish graduate student, Rumeysa Öztürk, was arrested for being one of four authors of an op-ed. At the time it seemed absurd. Officials made bold claims about Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, but they offered no proof.
Officials used the phrase “engaged in activities in support of Hamas” to justify the use of Section 1227. This specific statute allows for deportation based on “adverse foreign policy consequences,” which effectively bypasses the need to prove a specific crime was committed. By using such charged language without providing details, the administration created a public impression of a terror-linked threat.
The problem? It never seemed like they had the goods. The National Review now reports, that “Government investigators found no evidence that Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, had “engaged in antisemitic activity” or made “any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally,” before the Trump administration tried to deport her, according to newly unsealed court documents.
At the time, according to a CBS report, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” but did not provide details about her alleged activities. Ozturk was one of four university students who was listed as the author of a March 2024 campus newspaper opinion piece urging Tufts to adopt resolutions from the student government to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” That article does not mention Hamas.
By linking a call for university divestment to “support for Hamas,” the administration set a precedent that speech—specifically speech by non-citizens—could be reclassified as a security threat. The new court documents confirm that there was no “secondary” activity or secret evidence; the op-ed was essentially the beginning and end of the case.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio supported this transition at the time. At a press availability where he was asked about the Rumeysa Öztürk case, the Secretary of State certainly made it sound like there was evidence:
The activities presented to me meet the standard of what I’ve just described to you: people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States. If necessary and a court compels us, we’ll provide that information.
The information the National Review now says doesn’t exist.
In addition, the Secretary of State argued that a visa is a privilege that can be revoked if a student becomes a “social activist.” He moved the goalposts from “deporting people who break the law” to “deporting people whose legally protected speech is deemed disruptive.”
The significance of the National Review report is that it isn’t just a “he-said, she-said” political dispute. Because these are internal government documents, they represent the administration’s own investigators admitting that the public justifications provided by the State Department and DHS were built on a vacuum. The innovation here isn’t that the government stretched the truth—it’s that it formalized a process where the truth was never required in the first place.
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