Canary Mission Focused Tufts’ Rumeysa Ozturk for ICE Arrest
Demonstrators at a rally for Rumeysa Ozturk following her arrest in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Photograph: Religion Ninivaggi/Reuters
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Tufts College doctoral pupil, was leaving her condo in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Tuesday to hitch pals in breaking her Ramadan quick when she was arrested by ICE brokers. Video of the brokers in masks accosting Ozturk on the road generated a brand new wave of public outrage simply two weeks after the Trump administration sought to deport different pro-Palestinian activists holding inexperienced playing cards and visas.
By most accounts, Ozturk was not a outstanding activist on campus, which has prompted questions as to why she was arrested. Her most vital foray into politics seems to be a collectively written March 2024 op-ed within the pupil newspaper that urged the college to have interaction with a student-led push for Tufts to divest from Israel. However the editorial was sufficient for Ozturk to be highlighted by Canary Mission, an internet site devoted to calling out individuals and organizations it accuses of participating in antisemitic or anti-Israel habits by compiling and publishing detailed dossiers on them. (Canary Mission didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
Days after Ozturk’s arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that the U.S. had revoked her pupil visa, linking her case to the administration’s ongoing crackdown on pupil activism and implying she is a protester. “We gave you a visa to return and research and get a level, to not turn out to be a social activist that tears up our college campuses. If we’ve given you a visa and then you definately determine to do this, we’re going to take it away,” he advised reporters throughout a press convention.
Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, has filed a petition in court docket alongside the ACLU, looking for her rapid launch. “Rümeysa Öztürk’s expertise is stunning, merciless, and unconstitutional. For practically 24 hours, we couldn’t find her, and regardless of a court docket order to forestall the federal government from taking her out of Massachusetts, we lastly discovered the Trump administration had shipped her to Louisiana,” she mentioned in a assertion. “Criticizing U.S. overseas coverage and human-rights violations is neither unlawful nor grounds for detention. The federal government should instantly launch Rümeysa to proceed her research and rejoin her group.”
A number of different extra outstanding activists detained by the Trump administration are equally profiled on the location. Canary Mission lists Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia College graduate pupil and authorized everlasting resident arrested earlier this month, accusing him of main “pro-Hamas” protests on campus — the identical rationale the U.S. has used to start his deportation proceedings. Additionally featured is Mapheze Saleh, the Palestinian American spouse of Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown College graduate pupil who was detained. Suri’s lawyer has argued that his consumer has no felony file and that his arrest was as a result of his father-in-law being a former adviser to a Hamas chief, in line with the New York Instances.
Canary Mission emerged in 2015 with a concentrate on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, motion to doc “people and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American faculty campuses and past.” However the web site rapidly gained prominence with the rise of on-campus protests after the October 7 assaults on Israel, because it educated its concentrate on pupil activists demonstrating in opposition to the battle in Gaza. The group behind the location has been accused of conflating pro-Palestinian activism with hate speech and for doxxing the individuals it highlights. On Canary Mission, Ozturk’s profile features a picture of her in addition to an outline of the area the place she lives. The web page additionally options screenshots of the op-ed and her LinkedIn web page in addition to descriptions of school programs she was slated to show this yr.
Makes an attempt to find out who funds and leads Canary Mission have been notably murky. In 2018, The Ahead reported that the Jewish Neighborhood Federation of San Francisco had donated $100,000 to the trigger by way of its basis through an Israeli charity known as Megamot Shalom. The Jewish Neighborhood Basis of Los Angeles ended its grants to Megamot Shalom after its ties to Canary Mission had been reported. The Nation studies that the charity is run by Jonathan Bash, a British-born resident of Jerusalem who has denied a reference to the group.
Canary Mission’s work has additionally been used to detain college students in Israel. Lara Alqasem, a Palestinian American graduate pupil, was barred from coming into the nation to check at a neighborhood college in 2018 due to her previous work with the College of Florida’s chapter of College students for Justice in Palestine. Alqasem’s attorneys mentioned the federal government’s file on their consumer was largely primarily based on her profile on Canary Mission’s web site, in line with the Instances. She would later win an attraction to remain within the nation.
