They are a group of progressive Jewish organizations and congregations, and they are coming to the defense of Lu Mesa Ozturk, a Muslim graduate student at Tufts.
The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and the Upper West Side in New York, as well as J-Street, an Israeli advocacy group. On Thursday, they filed a brief in a federal courthouse in Burlington, Virginia, opposed the tactics the government was using against Ozturk in the name of its fight against anti-Semitism.
Simply put, the group argued that after surrounding her on a street near her home in Summerville, Massachusetts and arresting her, she should be released from the Louisiana Immigration Detention Center, where she has been detained for more than two weeks.
“The Jews came to America to escape a similar generation of predation,” says Brief. “Nevertheless, the image of Oztzurku's arrest in Massachusetts in the 21st century evokes the oppressive tactics adopted by the authoritarian regimes left behind by the many ancestors of Amichi's members in Odessa, Kishnev and Warsaw.”
According to the International Association of Educators, there are reports of around 1,000 international students and academics from universities across the country that have lost their legal status since mid-March.
Anecdotally, visas are usually cancelled with little or no notice, without telling students what was wrong, and in some cases students have committed legal violations, such as speeding or drunk driving, according to universities and lawyers monitoring their departures. But I don't have some. If students do not voluntarily leave, they face deportation.
The Trump administration defended the campaign and said it was revoking visas for students who broke the law and engaged in anti-Semitic harassment and violence. Several Jewish activists praised the effort, reflecting the Trump administration's mantra, “Visa is a privilege, not a right.”
But mainstream Jewish groups have expressed concern about crackdowns, even though they have approved the Trump administration's focus on anti-Semitism.
With the growing number of students targeted by the Trump administration, Jewish groups may not like the views of pro-Palestinian students, but say they cannot tolerate student sweeps on vague grounds without formal accusations against them.
Oztzurk's detention was a spokesman for Palestinian pro-protestors following the arrest of Columbia University alumnus Mahmoud Khalil two weeks ago.
A Louisiana immigration judge discovered on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Halil. However, he is still challenging the case in another court. In response to his case, the Boston branch of Jewish faculty and staff involved wrote an open letter entitled “Not In Our Name.” It is signed by nearly 3,000 faculty members, staff and students from universities across the United States.
“We are being criticized without ambiguity by anyone who denies our names and anyone who harasssss, exiles, arrests or invokes the names of members of our campus community, and anyone who calls out the names of members of our international community,” the letter wrote.
Salakudin, director of academic affairs for the US Jewish Commission, said several federal interventions, including anti-Semitic congressional investigations on campus, were “transformative” forcing universities to face campus problems.
But she said the Ozturk incident appears to be a “clear disregard on the part of the federal government about the right of people in the US soil to speak their hearts.”
The only evidence that emerged against her is an opinion essay co-authored by her critical Israel.
“The idea that for something someone writes, someone is being pulled away from the street, for what they think, we all need to fight back against it,” said Elaine Landes, a member of the reconstructionist synagogue Drucey Zzedek in West Newton, Massachusetts.
“For me, the overall driving force to fight anti-Semitism feels like we're being used on another agenda. It doesn't keep our community safe,” she said. “We need to look at other people.”
Another signer, Ryan Bauer, a senior rabbi at the San Francisco Emanuel Congregation, said he supported Oztzurku despite his opposition to the essay. In it, she pushed Tufts to end his financial ties with Israel and to acknowledge Israel's actions in Gaza as a massacre.
“I don't like her statements. I think they're wrong,” Rabbi Bauer said. But he believes in freedom of speech, saying, “The beauty of America is that we don't all agree with each other.”
He felt so strongly that he said that Ozturk's detention violated Jewish values ​​and that he spoke about it in a recent sermon.
“It's naive to see the floor falling from under her, and think that those cracks will ultimately not reach our feet,” he said.
A Vermont federal judge who spent the night in which Ozulk was detained before being sent to Louisiana is scheduled to hear her habeas-held petition for release from custody Monday.
Dana Goldstein and Vimal Patel Reports of contributions.
