U.S. State Department has revoked the visas of at least 300 people, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday, after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student who is the latest supporter of Palestinian causes to be swept up in the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants who have expressed their political views.
"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.
"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 Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student who was detained on Tuesday in Boston by masked and plainclothes agents. She had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel's war on Gaza.
The detention of Öztürk, 30, a doctoral student at Tufts University, has sparked outrage and condemnation from Türkiye and the United States.
She was swiftly moved out of Massachusetts, a demonstration of how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is sending immigrants who are taken into custody to detention centers or deporting them altogether before a federal judge has a chance to weigh in on their case and possibly halt the actions.
Öztürk had been moved to an ICE detention center in Louisiana by the time her lawyer went to court and a judge ordered her to be kept in Massachusetts, U.S. government lawyers said in a court document Thursday. They said they made her lawyers aware that she was being moved and facilitated contact with her Wednesday night.
Rubio confirmed the State Department revoked Öztürk's visa and 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."
The top U.S. diplomat did not say if Öztürk participated in those activities.
Her arrest came a year after Öztürk 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.
Öztürk'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 Trump administration argues that certain protests are antisemitic and can undermine U.S. foreign policy.
