Trump And Rubio Deporting Rümeysa Öztürk Under The F*ck It, YOLO Act

Thanks for empowering this guy, SCOTUS.

More or less.

It has now been three weeks since Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, was kidnapped off the street by America’s immigration Gestapo. Öztürk was told that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked her student visa, and she was now going to be deported. Her supposed crime? Writing an op-ed in the Tufts student paper last year criticizing the school for not listening more to its students who were protesting the United States’ support of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.

Since then, reporters have kept trying to remind Rubio that there’s this whole constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech that even noncitizen visa holders in the United States have. Rubio’s response has been to darkly hint, without showing a lick of evidence — because there is no evidence, it’s all an excuse to take their bigot dicks out for a swing — that Öztürk has been supporting terrorists or some other nefarious activity.

You’re not going to believe this, but Rubio is so full of shit that his shoes squish when he walks.

This is not just us talking, it’s also the Washington Post. The paper reported on Monday the sequence of events that led up to the sight of six armed and masked dipshits handcuffing a foreign grad student on her way to break her Ramadan fast.

According to the Post, the Department of Homeland Security recommended revoking Öztürk’s visa under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA

allows for the deportation of a foreigner if the secretary of state has reasonable grounds to believe the person’s presence or activities has “adverse policy consequence for the United States,” according to a copy of a separate memo reviewed by The Post and sent by DHS to the State Department before her detention last month.

The State Department then looked into the case and produced an answering memo stating that the Trump administration had produced exactly zero evidence that Öztürk had made antisemitic statements (which wouldn’t have been grounds for deportation even if she had, see the point about the First Amendment above) or done anything “in support of Hamas,” as DHS claimed. Therefore, State concluded, Rubio did not have grounds for revoking her visa.

Ah, but what if there was another authority under the INA that allowed Rubio to revoke the visa? An authority that the legislation describes as the “Fuck 'em, what are they gonna do, sue us” provision?

Okay, the INA does not actually call the provision that. But it might as well, given the way the State Department, and specifically that noxious poop ogre Marco Rubio, are wielding it:

As a result of the lack of evidence, the department said she could be deported using a different authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the revocation of a visa at the secretary of state’s discretion.

So Congress passed a law that says 1) you can be deported if you committed some ill-defined offense against America, and 2) you can be deported if you DIDN’T commit some ill-defined offense against America so long as the secretary of State is a weak-willed and galactically bigoted moron.

To be fair, the INA was written in 1952 and was meant to be a restrictive immigration bill. Harry Truman vetoed it, but Congress ginned up the two-thirds of the votes of both chambers necessary to override the veto. So maybe the bill’s writers really did expect future secretaries of State might be extreme xenophobes who would need the tools to prove it. Mission accomplished, mid-20th-century members of Congress who, like today’s immigration restrictionists, wanted to only let in “desirable” ethnic groups!

How did Öztürk get on DHS’s radar, anyway? Do they have legions of eager white supremacists fresh off internships at The Daily Caller combing the nation’s college newspapers looking for anyone with a foreign-sounding name who might dare to suggest that America shouldn’t provide bombs to a country that we know will drop them on defenseless civilian populations?

Actually, we wouldn’t put that past them. But in this case, Öztürk may have come to DHS’s attention through Canary Mission, a mysterious group that has been doxing foreign anti-Israel protesters in an obvious effort to get them deported, or at least scare them into shutting up:

The Department of Homeland Security memo asking the State Department to revoke her visa used exactly the same language as the website: “ÖZTÜRK engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.” In other words, it looks like the DHS accusation against Öztürk was copied directly from Canary Mission.

Cool, our government is making these decisions based on the Internet ramblings of anonymous vigilantes working for an organization that keeps its origins and employees secret.

On Monday, the ACLU was in a Vermont courtroom representing Öztürk. After her abduction, she was almost immediately flown to a concentration camp — excuse us, “detention center” — in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. The government had hustled to get her from Boston into a jurisdiction in the South, where the judges are a lot less friendly to immigrants.

Trump Immigration Nazis Kidnap Another Victim For Wrongthink

The ACLU argues that while the government has the right to revoke Öztürk’s visa, she was illegally arrested. The organization’s lawyers who are representing Öztürk argued she should be brought back to New England and released for the duration of the proceedings. Unfortunately, even getting her back up North will take awhile.

A couple of days before the hearing, Öztürk released an affidavit describing her abduction and transport to Louisiana, and it sounds fucking insane. The government isn’t prepared for the huge influx of unfortunate people caught in the Trump administration’s ramped-up deportation regime, so it doesn’t have adequate space and supplies for them. Additionally, the people working in the Louisiana concentration camp just sound like giant assholes:

Make them stay in bed all day in a tiny, unsanitary room they share with a mouse? Do the guards in Louisiana think these people are writers or something?

[WaPo / ProPublica / CNN]

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