The arrest and ongoing detention of a Tufts University graduate student over the publication of an op-ed for the school newspaper is a blatant violation of her First Amendment rights, according to a constitutional law expert at the CATO Institute and other advocacy groups.
Thomas Berry, the director of the Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, in a piece published by the libertarian think tank earlier this week, and according to an amicus brief the group filed with the federal courts, says that the U.S. government and Secretary of State Marco Rubio can not legally revoke a student’s visa over their protected speech, as seems to be the case with Rümeysa Öztürk.
“The Trump Administration is basically trying to enact an ideological test for who is allowed to be here,” Berry told the Herald on Thursday. “They are pushing to limit what is allowed under statute and what’s allowed under the First Amendment.”
The Trump administration’s plan to crack down on illegal immigration took a local and unprecedented turn late last month, when Öztürk was surrounded by masked immigration agents, handcuffed, placed in an unmarked car, and whisked out of state despite a court order demanding she be kept in Massachusetts.
The Turkish national’s student visa had been revoked — a fact she and her lawyers learned only after her sudden disappearance — and according to CATO’s court filing it was stripped away over an op-ed published in a Tufts student newspaper calling on the university to recognize the results of a vote by the student government regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. Rubio claims he revoked the student’s visa because she was acting in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The Trump Administration has provided no evidence to support that claim.
Öztürk is currently being held in Louisiana as the Trump administration fights a Vermont judge’s order to return her to New England by Thursday. A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for May 6.
In their court filing, made alongside the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Rutherford Institute, Pen America, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, CATO contends that “it is unthinkable that a person in a free society could be snatched from the street, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation for expressing an opinion the government dislikes.”
“Certainly not in the country envisioned by our nation’s framers. America’s founding principle, core to who and what we are as a Nation, is that liberty comes not from the benevolent hand of a king, but is an inherent right of every man, woman, and child,” they groups wrote.