US Senator slams Rubio’s claims on detained Turkish student as ‘big lie’
WASHINGTON
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's claim about detained Turkish student Rumeysa Özturk was a "big lie," Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Monday.
"Marco Rubio is not conducting much foreign policy these days, but he has become the guy who disappears foreign students in the United States and even people with green cards, permanent residents for exercising their First Amendment rights," Van Hollen said in a video on X.
His remarks came one day after media reports said the State Department has found no evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, engaged in antisemitic activity or supported a terror organization.
"And today we read in the story in the Washington Post that an internal State Department memo clearly indicates that in the case of a Fulbright student, Miss Öztürk, that they had no basis at all for claiming she was disrupting U.S. foreign policy or engaging in antisemitic activities, and yet this is the claim that Marco Rubio is making in public. So, it turns out that it's a big lie," said Van Hollen.
The memo, described to the Post by anonymous sources, said Rubio lacked sufficient grounds to revoke Öztürk’s visa under a provision that allows him to act in defense of foreign policy interests.
Asked about her case last month, Rubio defended the revocation of her student visa, saying: "We give you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
Öztürk, a PhD student in child and human development at Tufts, was detained by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside her apartment in Somerville. Her detention followed online targeting by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which took aim at her for co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, in March 2024 that criticized the university’s response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 51,000 Palestinians.
"So to Marco Rubio, why don't you stop picking on vulnerable students, and why don't you show up and testify in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, something you have not done since you were confirmed," he added.
The senator stressed that President Donald Trump's plan to remove 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip is "despicable."
"So, if you want to talk about U.S. foreign policy and U.S. foreign policy toward the Netanyahu government, why don't you come to the Foreign Relations Committee, and stop picking on students and disappearing them for exercising their First Amendment rights," he said.
A U.S. federal judge in the state of Vermont said Monday he is weighing whether to release Öztürk and hold a hearing in May as she challenges her detention.
Her lawyers argue that the arrest and continued detention violate her constitutional rights, including her First Amendment right to free speech and Fifth Amendment protections.
They are asking the court to either release her on bail or order her transfer from a detention facility in Basile, Louisiana, to Vermont, where her legal team filed an emergency habeas petition the night of her arrest.
“These were unusual steps that were designed to punish Ms. Öztürk for her protected speech — chill her speech and send a very chilling message to everyone who was watching,” said Jessie Rossman, one of Öztürk’s attorneys, during the hearing. “If you engage in speech that the administration disagrees with, you will be punished.”
Öztürk’s legal team is seeking her release on bail or a court order that would bring her from Louisiana to Vermont, where she was briefly held before being flown south and where her legal team filed an emergency petition on the night of her arrest.
During Monday's hearing, Judge Sessions and government attorneys debated whether the court has jurisdiction to consider Öztürk's detention while removal proceedings are ongoing, as well as whether her legal petition correctly identified the appropriate immigration officials.
The judge said he was considering holding an evidentiary hearing in May to examine the circumstances of Öztürk’s arrest and continued detention.
