The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
By now you may have heard that President Trump’s ICE thugs detained a Tufts student under shocking circumstances. This is only the latest in a developing trend in which numerous students are being targeted for removal based, in many cases, on what appear to be their political associations and viewpoints. In a stunning moment on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated straight-out that the administration is hoping to do this hundreds of times. We think this is a watershed moment: Rubio confirmed the scope and reach of Trump’s deportation program and also confirmed that he’s willingly carrying them out for Trump. Today, we’re talking about all this with Shev Dalal-Dheini, a senior official at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Shev, thanks so much for coming on.
Shev Dalal-Dheini: My pleasure.
Sargent: The latest example of this involves a student named Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen who has a student visa for doctoral work at Tufts. She was detained by Homeland Security agents near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Video of the event is all over the internet. It’s shocking. The ICE agents appear masked. Now, Homeland Security is claiming that she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” and that this was grounds for her visa to be revoked. Shev, what do we know about this situation so far?
Dalal-Dheini: There’s very limited information that is out there and on what is supporting that determination that she supported Hamas activities. All we know is that she was one of four co-authors of an opinion piece in the university’s own newsletter calling for the university officials to support resolutions of the student body to recognize that there’s a genocide happening in Palestine and also to divest from businesses that support Israel. So that is all the information that is currently available: that she was one of four authors of this editorial piece. We don’t have additional information about other involvement that she has. She’s a Turkish citizen on a student visa who has continued to comply with her status.
Sargent: I’m going to read from a Washington Post article about this, which underscores your point, which is how little we know about why she’s been detained and why she’s being deported. The Washington Post says this, “Ozturk does not appear to have been a leading figure in the pro-Palestinian protests at Tufts.” She co-authored this op-ed that you discussed. The op-ed, written by four students and endorsed by 32 others, argued against the school’s rejection of Student Senate Resolutions, which they wrote were an effort “to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.” Now, that sure sounds a lot like speech to me. What do you think?
Dalal-Dheini: Yes, sounds like the First Amendment to me as well. And I think that that’s what is really important here. We may not agree with what folks say—whether you’re a U.S. citizen or you’re a noncitizen, we don’t always have to agree with what our opinions are but our Constitution protects us all equally. Our Constitution has the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has held its precedent for over decades that it applies to U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike. And I think that’s what’s crucial. It’s not about what was stated in the op-ed or what her beliefs may be, but it’s a question of whether or not someone is being detained and possibly deported because of their exercise of their First Amendment rights.
Sargent: And we know very little from the administration beyond this idea that she engaged in activities in support of Hamas—which could be just this op-ed for all we know. We don’t know yet. I want to stress that a number of other students are being targeted this way. There’s Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old student at Columbia who’s accused of attending demonstrations in support of Palestinians. She’s lived here since she was seven years old. There’s Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri who were both legally present in the United States. Khalil was a legal permanent resident, Suri was here on a student visa. They both have wives who are U.S. citizens. The charges against all of them appear very thin, and a lot of this is blocked in court for now anyway. Shev, can you give us the rundown on these?
Dalal-Dheini: Yeah. We don’t know much. Again, we don’t have the evidence. The government hasn’t come out with allegations other than saying that they are in some way associated with Hamas. It seems like it’s more about their political statements, their participation in protest activity, or even their written opinions, which is similar to what happened with Ms. Ozturk. Overall, what we can discern from the facts is that these are all similar cases. These are all related. They’re all being targeted for their political beliefs. And beyond that, we don’t have any other evidence of what nefarious activity they may have been participating in.
Sargent: Right. We should stress that maybe the administration will produce proof of exceptional and extensive wrongdoing on the part of all these people, but they haven’t yet. They’ve been pressed over and over, and they still haven’t. By the way, as far as we can tell, the three we mentioned earlier—Yunseo Chung, Mahmoud Khalil, and Badar Khan Suri—are being targeted for removal under a statute that allows Rubio to revoke legal protections if he deems someone a foreign policy threat. We don’t know for sure yet, but the latest one, Ozturk, might also be getting targeted under the statute. Again, we don’t know for sure. But in all these cases, the evidence has been very thin that they constitute a threat. Can you talk about this provision that they seem to be using that empowers the secretary of state this way?
Dalal-Dheini: Yeah, this is a really arcane foreign policy provision that has not been used frequently or has very rarely been used by the government. It’s about when the secretary of state has reasonable grounds to believe that someone’s presence, a noncitizen’s presence, would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences to the U.S.; that would then make them deportable. But I would have to reiterate: [having] reasonable grounds to believe is the first piece of it. The second piece is that they have serious adverse foreign policy consequences. I’m not sure how a college student protesting impacts our foreign policy, and that also has not been articulated by the secretary of state or the U.S. government.
Sargent: Well, to your point, we’ve now set the stage to discuss Rubio’s remarks at a press conference on Thursday. He talked about these efforts to deport students, and here’s what he said.
Marco Rubio (audio voiceover): We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.
Reporter (audio voiceover): You’re saying it could be more than 300 people?
Rubio (audio voiceover): Sure. I mean, at some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them.
Sargent: Shev, that’s extraordinary. He says, We do it every day. We might do it hundreds of times. And by the way, according to The Washington Post’s John Hudson, Rubio was also asked what Ozturk did to merit losing her visa, and Rubio wouldn’t say beyond writing that opinion column. What do you make of all that?
Dalal-Dheini: When we’re talking about the authority, the statutes do give the secretary of state authority to revoke a nonimmigrant visa. But it’s usually based on receipt of derogatory information such as an arrest, or they’re looking at somebody who didn’t meet the requirement of admission at the time the visa was given, or where there’s, again, derogatory information provided by another U.S. government agency. At this point, we don’t have any of that information. We have no evidence that they have failed to maintain their status, that they were not entitled to their visas when they were given their visas. The only derogatory information that is available is that people were expressing their political opinions or their right to speech, and that is what’s being punished currently by the secretary of state.
Sargent: Yes. And Rubio’s quotes today strike me as important for another reason. The legislative history of the statute in question that authorizes Rubio to do these removals on the basis that he determines that they’re a foreign policy threat shows that Congress’s intent was for it to be used sparingly and not primarily to target speech. So Rubio’s claim that he’s going to be doing this hundreds of times and every day whenever he sees someone he doesn’t like walking down the street sure seems to be at odds with that intent, doesn’t it? Can you talk about this?
Dalal-Dheini: Yeah. So it’s interesting. When this provision, this foreign policy ground was created by Congress, they expressly included a safe harbor provision that explicitly prevented the removal of someone because of their past, current, or expected beliefs that would otherwise be lawful in the U.S. So if a U.S. citizen said that, if that was a legal action, then it would be legal and they should be protected from removal if they’re a noncitizen. The only way the secretary of state can overcome that safe harbor exception is that if they personally determine that the person’s presence would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest. And we don’t know, again, what that compelling U.S. foreign policy interest [is].
In the past, including in the legislative history, the examples that Congress gave about this compelling standard were pretty high. One of the examples is that the individual’s presence would actually violate a treaty or an international agreement. Here we have nothing to that level.
Sargent: We certainly don’t. And I think what the administration will try to say, and they have kind of said it, is that the administration’s foreign policy goal here is to combat antisemitism. But it’s also vague. I wonder whether this stuff is legally vulnerable on vagueness grounds. Rubio is just basically saying these people constitute a serious threat to U.S. foreign policy and not much more than that. Maybe the statute itself is vulnerable, but all this seems very vulnerable to legal challenges, right? How do you see this unfolding?
Dalal-Dheini: It’s already been susceptible to legal challenge, right? The statute has previously been found unconstitutional by a federal court because of the vagueness of it. So I think maybe you should be a judge (laughs). But [it’s vulnerable] especially when it’s related to foreign policy, because nobody knows what our U.S. foreign policy is. Oftentimes, it’s very secretive. It’s conducted at very closed levels and in covert manner, so it would be very difficult for people to know, especially at the time when they got their visa, whether they would be engaging in something that would violate federal policy. You would want to consider that these individuals all got their visas and their permanent residences well before this administration announced what its foreign policy would be as it relates to antisemitism.
Sargent: Just to be clear, when you say it was found unconstitutional by a federal court, what happened after that?
Dalal-Dheini: Well, I think the case got dismissed on other grounds. Ultimately, the law was not struck down because it was decided on other grounds, but I think it is definitely ripe for challenge. It is being challenged currently, and we’ll see how this proceeds in the courts.
Sargent: Shev, just to wrap this up, it really looks like Rubio is emerging as a central figure in Donald Trump’s deportation regime. I think this is striking. Rubio, a decade ago, was really a heroic figure in the immigration debate in a certain respect. He stuck his neck out and very bravely argued for humane immigration reform, and even spoke out powerfully about the humanity of migrants. But now he’s emerging as central to some of the most questionable deportations that Donald Trump is doing. What do you think of that?
Dalal-Dheini: I’m concerned about the lack of respect for the law and for the Constitution in carrying out these mandates and these orders. We know that Secretary Rubio, as you said, has had a better track record on these issues in the past. [I] really hope and implore that there is some recognition of what our law requires, what due process means, and that we are not just targeting people who really aren’t having any direct impact on our foreign policy or not posing a threat to our national security just because they are voicing opinions on a college campus.
Sargent: We really need Rubio to say more clearly what the grounds for doing these things really is.
Dalal-Dheini: Yes, absolutely. If individuals are legitimately problematic and there’s evidence that proves that, nobody wants them in the U.S. But right now, all we have is their voice and their pen, and those are not actionable.
Sargent: Certainly not. We really are hoping for better from Secretary Rubio. Shev Dalal-Dheini, thank you so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it.
Dalal-Dheini: Thank you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.