Tufts luck: Indian-American educator, judge in eye of ICE storm over detention of Turkish scholar

The TOI Correspondent from Washington: The India-born President of Tufts University and an Indian-American judge are caught up in the turbulence surrounding the detention and prospective deportation of a Turkish scholar Rumeysa Ozturk, accused of pro-Hamas activism on the campus of an institution with more than 1200 international students, and strong ties with India.
Sunil Kumar, the first Tufts President of color and the first Asian American to hold the position in the university’s 170-year history, is under fire from students who say the institution is not living up to its mission to encourage critical thinking and protecting free speech in the Ozturk case, and accused it of a weak response to her purported abduction.
In the hours after she was detained, Kumar had emailed the Tufts community asserting “the university had no pre-knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities prior to the event.” He also said the location where the detention took place is not affiliated with Tufts University.
But agitated students, some 2000 of whom gathered for a rally in support of Ozturk this week, urged the university to go beyond its current stance of offering immigration resources and support and push for a stronger condemnation of the Trump administration and protection for students.
“We, members of the Tufts community, are appalled and enraged by the unlawful abduction of Tufts PhD Fulbright student Rümeysa Öztürk by federal authorities,” a petition which has collected almost 1,500 signatures, reads. “We call on the Tufts administration to commit to defending our community against continued targeted attacks.”
The students argue that Ozturk does not meet the “Rubio standard” of a campus agitator “involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus” — activities that the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said would result in revocation of visa and deportation. She only co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily, the student journal, calling on Kumar to endorse Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions for the university to recognize genocide in Gaza and divest from Israeli corporations.
“Öztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value…the withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” Tufts Daily, whose editor Arghya Thallapragada is also Indian-American, said in an editorial on Friday.
The detention, which some lawmakers have also characterized as abduction, has sent a chill through nearly 80,000 foreign students attending more than 60 Colleges in the greater Boston/Cambridge area — and more than 1.2 million across the country. Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch is among those pleading to retain the state’s reputation as “a center of learning and intellectual, religious, and cultural tolerance.”
“Snatching an international student off our streets who is lawfully in our country and attending one of our universities and then bundling her off to an ICE detention center 1,700 miles away without a hearing is a sickening reminder of the Gestapo-like conduct from another age,” Lynch said, requesting federal authorities for her immediate return to Massachusetts.
But the Trump administration has simply ignored the request as it did with the orders of District Judge Indira Talwani, who heard the initial habeas corpus petition following Ozturk’s detention by ICE and ordered that she not be moved out of Massachusetts, but was told she had already been transported to Louisiana.
In a separate order on Friday, another District Judge, Denise Casper, halted Ozturk’s deportation from the US until further court review.
Both Talwani and Casper are being described as “Obama judges” by MAGA activists in an increasingly polarized atmosphere with charges from the Trump administration that such “activist judges” are transgressing into executive domain.
“There are 677 local district judges. Under current procedure, the president needs unanimous consent from all 677 to implement a major decision. If just 1 communist out of 677 unelected judges disagrees, the action is frozen. Nationwide. That is not democracy. That is tyranny,” argued President Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller.