Free speech advocates: It doesn't matter what this person said. In this case they wrote an opinion piece in a college newspaper. For this they had their Visa revoked and have been pulled off the street at my son's college. This is not ok! I don't agree with her opinion, many people don't, but she is allowed to have it, and to speak clearly in the public square. THIS IS NOT OK.
An F-1 visa can be revoked if the U.S. government determines the holder has violated its conditions:
* failing to maintain full-time enrollment or engaging in unauthorized work
* committed acts that breach U.S. law, such as criminal behavior
* activities deemed a national security threat under the Immigration and Nationality Act
We don't have all of the information in the case, hopefully it does come out.
Marco Rubio has confirmed (in a press conference today) that Rumeysa Ozturk is being deported purely based on her opinions, not based on any illegal actions she has taken.
This will get flagged and killed by users claiming it's because they don't want politics here, but really just don't want to admit to themselves what's going on. Some things are worth standing up for.
The story can also be considered on-topic because it shows how the USA is increasingly becoming a bad place to start a business.
When foreign talent can be snatched by masked secret police at any time and the rule of law is increasingly ignored, it hardly creates a favorable business environment.
In the US? Wasn't the whole thing that you could say what you wanted without fear in the US?
I understand that people say these things about Saudi Arabië and China and wherever else, but all my life the selling point of the US has been that it's the land of the free.
Please tear down the Statue of Liberty because it's an absolute embarrassment at this point. It's like the D in DPRK now.
Immigrants still have many constitutional rights - they’re rushing people out of the country to avoid court cases they know they’ll lose – but even if that wasn’t true, in a constitutional democracy that has to follow a legal process.
One of the big questions is how you define “activism”. She appears to have been targeted for supporting democratic initiatives by her fellow students based on the belief that killing civilians is wrong. Once you’re at that point, people could get in trouble for many innocuous beliefs, which suggests that people should hesitate to come here if anything they build can be taken away by Dear Leader without warning or legal process.
Do you seriously believe the punishment here matches the "crime" of writing an article? I don't even see the problem with it. You want people to come and better your country, or do you want them to be docile slaves? And who even decides what counts as activism? If I write an article about wanting my campus to serve better food, should I be deported?
But you're anyways missing the point: If you can't be yourself, stand up for your values and live freely, you will not move to a country. This is the US now, and because of that the US will lose out on great talent, people will be apprehensive of starting businesses, study or otherwise in the US.
This is common knowledge when you visit authoritarian regimes, such as North Korea or Russia, but it's completely fine when you visit well developed democracies.
The US can no longer be considered as such, and you're fine with that?
When masked thugs disappear someone who isn't accused of any crime and then no one knows where that person is at and they're denied their civil rights, that's kidnapping.
For people outside the US: would you travel to the US now? What if your employer asked you to do it - what would you say? How do you feel about conferences and events held in the US?
Holding conferences on the US was already a complete barrier, as it would require a work visa, and even if I really wanted to go, I'd need every information and inscription to be available 6 months in advance.
It's not a theoretical for me anymore, I've already cancelled a trip I was planning this summer, and have expressed concerns with friends and family who are still thinking of making the journey.
> For people outside the US: would you travel to the US now?
Yes. I would go to a conference to the USA, although that's incredibly rare that Canadian companies pay for the travel. Local conferences ( same city as the office one employed ) are OK though.
not an accident - if they decline to tell the lawyer where she is, then lawyers can't file a suit at the correct court and so there is de facto no judicial review available until her location is revealed.
The Turkish government doesn't care about this kind of stuff. If Turkish agents black-bagged anyone in the US, it'd be either Gulen or a Kurdish separatist.
(Michael Flynn discussed black-bagging Gulen as a favor to Erdogan during the first Trump administration, but that proposal went nowhere [0,1]).
"The lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said Wednesday afternoon that she still does not know where her client is being held and has not been able to contact her."
As far as I can tell, she was doxed by a pro-Israel group for supporting BDS and lending her name to a Tufts Daily op-ed calling for Tufts to adopt a resolution to acknowledge a Palestinian genocide: https://canarymission.org/individual/Rumeysa_Ozturk
Has anyone been deported for BDS support? Her visa has been revoked.
There was this song from early 80s by UK band Discharge: "Free Speech for the Dumb".
It came to US when Metallica covered it in early 90s and people there though that it was praising free speech - that 'even dumb deserve free speech'.
Meanwhile the song is about empty phrase that 'free speech' is. Empty phrase.
Somewhat incredibly, the administration is citing a McCarthy-era 1952 law that many read as explicitly antisemitic and targeted at Jewish eastern-european survivors of the holocaust lest they be too sympathetic to communism as the legal basis for these actions. That law sought to keep people out, but the administration seems to believe it can also be used to deport people.
An ironic quote:
"In a 1952 edition of The New York Times, then-Anti-Defamation League president Benjamin Epstein was quoted as saying that immigration regulations like the McCarran law were 'examples of the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals.'"[0]
The ADL declined to make an endorsement in the last election.
Their press page doesn't mention this incident one way or another. They did express concern that the anti-DEI push removed some Holocaust articles from government web stes.
