The US has revoked more than 300 visas, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says, as the Trump administration cracks down on foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
Rubio warned authorities were looking every day for “lunatics creating a ruckus” after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.
Rubio’s comments were in response to a question about Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained on Tuesday evening in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked and plainclothes agents.
Her detention was the latest Trump administration action against a foreign student who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza.
“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 on Thursday at a news 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,” he told reporters on the plane back to Washington.
The top US diplomat confirmed the State Department revoked Ozturk’s visa but did not say what Ozturk had done specifically to merit such a move.
Rubio said Washington would take away any visa if students took part in actions such as “vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus”.
Rubio did not say whether Ozturk had taken part in those activities but said what was presented to him about her case had met the standard of “people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States”.
Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and PhD student at Tufts, 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 a student paper that criticised the Massachusetts university’s response to calls 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 immigration authorities not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice, the US Department of Justice in a filing on Thursday said she was in Louisiana and had been detained outside Massachusetts at the time the lawsuit was filed.
Mahsa Khanbabai, her lawyer, called the claims against her client baseless and noted she had not been accused of any crime.
The Trump administration has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are in the US legally and have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
The actions have been condemned by critics as an assault on free speech.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration argues that certain protests are anti-Semitic and can undermine US foreign policy.