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ICE official testifies that he was told to prioritize Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest
Agents from a part of ICE that deals with criminal cases were reportedly told to shift their focus.
A top official from the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office in Boston testified Tuesday that he received orders to prioritize the arrest of Tufts Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was swarmed by ICE agents on a Somerville sidewalk earlier this year and whisked to a detention center in Louisiana.
“I can’t recall a time that it’s come top down like this with a visa revocation,” Patrick Cunningham, an assistant special agent in charge at the Boston HSI office said, according to a new report from The Boston Globe.
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The operation to detain Öztürk, a Turkish national who was apparently targeted because she helped co-author a pro-Palestine op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, “developed pretty quickly,” Cunningham reportedly said in federal court.
HSI is a part of ICE that is ostensibly dedicated to investigating criminal cases, as opposed to immigration enforcement cases. The latter is handled by Enforcement and Removal Operations, a different part of ICE.
But, Cunningham reportedly said, shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration officials at HSI were told that immigration enforcement would be prioritized.
“It was not something that I had much experience with, if any,” Cunningham said, per Politico. “Most of my career as an agent and as a supervisor has been in enforcement of drug laws, drug smuggling, money laundering. … That’s changed recently.”
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Cunningham said he received information on Öztürk, including the op-ed, and did not see anything that indicated she had committed a crime. He was told that Öztürk was being targeted because her visa had been revoked. In the immediate aftermath of Öztürk’s arrest Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, without offering evidence, that her visa was revoked due to disruptive protest behavior.
Cunningham said he contacted the agency’s legal counsel to confirm the legality of Öztürk’s arrest because the request was so unusual, Politico reported.
Government officials, including Cunningham, have said that ICE specifically did not inform Öztürk that her visa had been revoked.
The testimony occurred during a trial in a lawsuit brought by the American Association of University Professors and other higher education organizations. They argue the Trump administration is unconstitutionally targeting noncitizens for deportation because of their political views.
Cunningham and three other officials who testified this week said that they were not explicitly told that Öztürk and other academics, like Mahmoud Khalil, were being targeted because of their pro-Palestine views. They were told that Rubio had determined that the academics’ presence in the U.S. was a threat to the country’s foreign policy, and therefore their visas or green cards had been revoked, according to Politico.
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After she was arrested, Öztürk was held in Louisiana for more than six weeks before a judge ordered her to be released. She returned to Massachusetts and is currently continuing her work at Tufts as she challenges her deportation proceedings.
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