US may have revoked more than 300 visas, says Rubio

GEORGETOWN, D.C. - U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday said the State Department may have revoked more than 300 visas and warned the Trump administration was looking every day for "these lunatics" after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.

"It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," Rubio said at a press conference in Guyana, without elaborating on whose visas had been revoked.

"At some point, I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them, but we're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up."

His comments were in answer to a question about Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student who was detained Tuesday evening in Somerville, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, by masked and plainclothes agents. She had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel's war in Gaza.

The top U.S. diplomat confirmed the State Department revoked Ozturk's visa but did not address details when asked what specific actions Ozturk had taken that merited revoking her visa.

Rubio said Washington would take away any visa that has been previously issued if students would participate in actions such as "vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus."

Rubio did not say if Ozturk participated in those activities.

Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and student in Tufts' doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development, had been in the country on an F-1 visa to study.

Her arrest came a year after Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school's student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized Medford, Massachusetts-based Tufts' response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide."

Following Ozturk's arrest, her lawyer filed a lawsuit arguing her detention was unlawful.

While a federal judge in Boston on Tuesday night ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to not move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice, the U.S. Department of Justice in a filing on Thursday said that she was now in Louisiana and had been detained outside of Massachusetts at the time the lawsuit was filed.

Mahsa Khanbabai, her lawyer, in a statement late Wednesday called the claims against her client "baseless" and noted she had not been accused of any crime.

"It appears the only thing she is being targeted for is her right to free speech," she said.

Ozturk's supporters say her detention is the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student engaged in such activism to be carried out by Trump's administration, which has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are legally in the U.S. and have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.

The actions have been condemned as an assault on free speech, though the Republican President Donald Trump's administration argues that certain protests are antisemitic and can undermine U.S. foreign policy.  — Reuters