Rubio says US may have revoked more than 300 visas

By Humeyra Pamuk

GEORGETOWN (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday the State Department may have revoked more than 300 visas and warned that the Trump administration was looking every day for "these lunatics" after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University.

Rubio's comments were in response to a question about Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student who was detained on Tuesday evening in Somerville, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, by masked and plainclothes agents. Her detention was the latest Trump administration action against a foreign student who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel's war in Gaza.

"It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas," Rubio said at a press conference in Guyana, without elaborating on whose visas had been revoked.

Speaking to reporters on the plane back to Washington, Rubio said the 300 revoked visas were a combination of student and visitor visas. He said he signed every single action.

"At some point, I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them, but we're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up."

The top U.S. diplomat confirmed the State Department revoked Ozturk's visa but did not address details when asked what specific actions Ozturk had taken that merited such a move.

Rubio said Washington would take away any visa that has been previously issued if students would participate in actions such as "vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus."

Rubio did not say whether Ozturk had participated in those activities but said that what was presented to him about her case had met the standard of "people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States."

Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and student in Tufts' doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development, had been in the country on an F-1 visa to study.

Her arrest came a year after Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school's student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized the Medford, Massachusetts-based university's response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide."

Following Ozturk's arrest, her lawyer filed a lawsuit arguing her detention was unlawful.

While a federal judge in Boston on Tuesday night ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to not move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours' notice, the U.S. Department of Justice in a filing on Thursday said that she was now in Louisiana and had been detained outside of Massachusetts at the time the lawsuit was filed.

Mahsa Khanbabai, her lawyer, in a statement late on Wednesday called the claims against her client "baseless" and noted she had not been accused of any crime.

"It appears the only thing she is being targeted for is her right to free speech," Khanbabai said.

Ozturk's supporters say her detention is the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student engaged in such activism to be carried out by the Trump administration, which has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are in the U.S. legally and have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.

The actions have been condemned by critics as an assault on free speech. Republican President Donald Trump's administration argues that certain protests are antisemitic and can undermine U.S. foreign policy.

"The people that we're getting rid of in our country are vandalizing, they're not protesters. They're taking over college campuses. They're harassing fellow students... They're not demonstrating, they're going beyond demonstration," Rubio said later on Thursday at a press conference in Suriname.

"We want them out. Every one of them I find, we're going to kick them out."

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Kemol King in Georgetown; Additional reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Bogota, Daphne Psaledakis in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chris Reese, Lisa Shumaker, Bill Berkrot and Saad Sayeed)