Who are the students Trump wants to deport?

Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri are among several students targeted by Trump.

On Tuesday, US authorities detained and revoked the student visa of Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who had voiced her support for Palestinians affected by the Gaza war.

Ozturk’s arrest is the latest instance of President Donald Trump’s administration acting against international college students over their support for Palestinians during the Gaza solidarity encampments that erupted across university campuses last year. Students who protested for Palestine are having their legal visas and residence status revoked and are being arrested and detained.

Here is more about the US university students who have been detained so far:

The Trump administration alleges that the students who participated in pro-Palestine protests spread anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus — a claim students, lawyers and activists have all rebutted. Jewish activists and groups have been at the forefront of many of the most prominent protests in the US against the Gaza war.

On January 29, Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”, in which he ordered the head of each executive department or agency to submit a report within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities and actions available for fighting anti-Semitism.

The White House published a fact sheet a day after this order. In the fact sheet, Trump said: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

His administration has since targeted multiple international students and scholars in the US.

Security camera footage from Tuesday evening shows six individuals in plainclothes taking Ozturk into custody near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Some of these officers were partially covering their faces. Ozturk had headed out alone to meet her friends for Iftar, the evening meal to break her Ramadan fast.

Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, filed a petition in Boston federal court late on Tuesday, arguing that Ozturk had been unlawfully detained. As a result, US District Judge Indira Talwani ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice.

Despite this, Ozturk was moved to Louisiana by Wednesday night, according to her lawyer.

US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an X post on Wednesday: “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” McLaughlin did not specify what these activities were.

“A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security,” McLaughlin wrote.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her. No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of,” Khanbabai said in a statement.

Why does Trump want to deport US students?

Tufts University President Sunil Kumar said in a written statement that the university was not informed before this arrest. “From what we have been told subsequently, the student’s visa status has been terminated, and we seek to confirm whether that information is true,” Kumar said.

The video of Ozturk’s arrest was captured on 32-year-old software engineer Michael Mathis’s security camera. “It looked like a kidnapping,” he said, according to a report by AP. “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”

On March 8, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who was the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) during the campus protests last year. He was taken from his university-owned New York City apartment while his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, recorded the arrest on her phone. This marked the first publicly known student deportation effort of its kind under the Trump administration.

McLaughlin alleged Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” but no evidence for this was provided. Abdalla said that the agents did not show a warrant while making the arrest. Khalil was transferred to an ICE processing facility in Jena, Louisiana.

At the time of arrest, Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card. When the ICE agents were told that Khalil had a green card, they said that this would be revoked. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted the link to a news article about Khalil’s arrest, captioning it “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

On March 10, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University.” Trump added that Khalil’s arrest was the first of many. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” Trump wrote, without offering any evidence to back his accusations against Khalil.

Khalil, 30, was an Algerian citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. He arrived at Columbia in January 2023 to pursue his Master’s degree in public administration. Khalil was among a small group of students who organised the first campus protest on October 12, 2024, five days after Israel’s war on Gaza broke out.

Amid the protests, Khalil was briefly suspended by Columbia, but reinstated after the university found no grounds for suspension. At the time, Khalil told the BBC that while he was a lead negotiator, he did not participate in the encampments, fearing he would lose his F-1 student visa.

It is unclear when he received his green card, but his wife, Abdalla, is a US citizen.

“The government’s unlawful policy of targeting noncitizens for arrest and removal based on protected speech is … viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” Khalil’s lawyers, led by Amy Belsher, wrote in a court filing on March 13.

Indian national Badar Khan Suri was arrested on the evening of March 17 at his home in northern Virginia. Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He had been in Virginia for three years and held a valid US student visa at the time of arrest.

Georgetown University said in a written statement: “We are not aware of [Suri] engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention.”

McLaughlin attributed Suri’s arrest to his “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism”. She wrote on X: “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”