The TOI Correspondent from Washington: The India-born President of Tufts University and an Indian-American judge are caught up in the turbulence surrounding the detention and prospective deportation of a Turkish scholar Rumeysa Ozturk, accused of pro-Hamas activism on the campus of an institution with more than 1200 international students, and strong ties with India.
Sunil Kumar, the first Tufts President of color and the first Asian American to hold the position in the university’s 170-year history, is under fire from students who say the institution is not living up to its mission to encourage critical thinking and protecting free speech in the Ozturk case, and accused it of a weak response to her purported abduction.
According to Kumar, the school had no previous knowledge of this event and did not share any details with federal authorities prior to the incident in an email to the Tufts neighborhood time after she was detained. Additionally, he claimed that Tufts University is not associated with the location where the confinement took place.
However, agitated students gathered for a rally in support of Ozturk this year, asking the school to reconsider its present position, which is to offer immigration support and resources, and advocate for a stronger criticism of the Trump presidency and student safety.
A petition with nearly 1,500 signatures declares,” We, Tufts community members, are appalled and enraged by the immoral violence of Tufts PhD Fulbright pupil Rümeysa ztürk by national authorities.” We urge the Tufts management to undertake to defending our nation’s population from continued, targeted problems.
The individuals claim that Ozturk does not adhere to the” Rubio common” of a school agitator who has been “involved in doing things like vandalizing institutions, harassing students, taking over houses, creating a ruckus,” which the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed may lead to the denial of a card and imprisonment. She only co-authored an op-ed in the student journal Tufts Daily in which she demanded that Kumar support the university’s resolutions to recognize the genocide in Gaza and to stop investing in Israeli companies.
The withholding of ideas and refraining from debate will only lead to the erosion of free expression, according to Tufts Daily, whose editor Arghya Thallapragada is also an Indian-American.” Ztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value,” said the editorial on Friday.
Nearly 80, 000 foreign students are enrolling in more than 60 colleges in the greater Boston/Cambridge area, and more than 1.2 million people are enrolled in the program, which some lawmakers have also characterized as abduction. One of the lawmakers in Massachusetts, Stephen Lynch, is asking for the state to maintain its reputation as” a center of learning and intellectual, religious, and cultural tolerance.”
A sickening reminder of the Gestapo-like behavior from another generation, Lynch said, pleading with federal authorities for her immediate return to Massachusetts.” Snatching an international student off our streets who is lawfully in our country, attending one of our universities, and then bundling her off at an ICE detention center 1, 700 miles away without a hearing is a sickening reminder of the Gestapo-like behavior from another age.
However, the Trump administration has simply ignored the request as it did with District Judge Indira Talwani’s orders, who had heard the initial habeas corpus petition after Ozturk was taken into custody by ICE and had decreed that she not be moved out of Massachusetts but had been informed that she had already been transported to Louisiana.
Another District Judge, Denise Casper, halted Ozturk’s deportation from the US until further court review in a separate order on Friday.
In a more polarized environment, MAGA activists accuse both Talwani and Casper of acting as” Obama judges” under the guise of “activist judges” and are claiming that they are breaking into the executive domain.
” There are 677 local district judges,” the statement reads. To put a significant decision into action, the president currently requires the all 677’s unanimous consent. The action is frozen if only one of the 677 unelected judges disagrees with one communist. Nationwide. That is not democracy. Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff and advisor to homeland security, called that tyranny.
