The Trump administration’s detention of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk rests on an opinion article she wrote in 2024, her lawyers said in a filing.
By Jonah Valdez
March 30, 2025
Source: The Intercept
Plainclothes ICE agents detain Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk
While in Georgetown, Guyana, on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter about what led to the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. The reporter mentioned an opinion piece Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024, published in The Tufts Daily, advocating for students’ calls to divest the school from companies with ties to Israel.
Rubio seemed to downplay the influence of the op-ed, written alongside three other Tufts graduate students, instead insinuating without evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, had vandalized her university, occupied buildings, and harassed students.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Government documents included in court filings, however, don’t back up Rubio’s claims of supposed unlawful behavior.
Several days before her arrest on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Öztürk’s student visa without notifying her, according to a DHS document through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, through which Öztürk had obtained her visa.
The government didn’t claim that Öztürk had broken any laws but instead cited a civil law provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The government has made the same argument in detaining former Columbia University student activist leader Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri, as well as in its efforts to arrest Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
In each of these cases, attorneys for the students argued the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and academics over their support for Palestine are ultimately an attack on their free speech rights.
Öztürk’s case is notable in that her detention and possible deportation may very well center on a published piece of journalism.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper,” Öztürk’s attorneys wrote in a habeas petition for her release filed on Friday. “Rümeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others. Indeed, her arrest and detention are part of a concerted and systemic effort by Trump administration officials to punish students and others identified with pro-Palestine activism.”
Activists and free speech advocates have been quick to remind that crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech did not begin with the Trump administration.
Since October 7, 2023, schools have censored, suspended, or fired professors and students over their speech on Palestine and Israel. In response to student encampments, President Joe Biden delivered law-and-order messages to protesters, accusing pro-Palestinian movements of antisemitism.
School administrators regularly called police on student protests, leading to violent arrests. In his statement from jail dictated to lawyers by phone, Khalil blamed Columbia’s administrators for having “laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.”
In the case of Öztürk, such doxing campaigns may have been a factor in her arrest. Attorneys said Öztürk feared for her safety after pro-Israel group Canary Mission posted about her in early February, pointing to her 2024 essay. Canary Mission, which shares personal information about pro-Palestine activists online and is often used by other Zionist groups to dox people, said Öztürk took part in “anti-Israel activism” and cited her 2024 opinion piece as its sole source to back its claim.
While it is not known whether the State Department was aware of the Canary Mission post, right-wing Zionist groups have been willing collaborators in helping direct the administration toward “pro-Hamas” individuals for deportation.
In its “Catch and Revoke” program, the State Department also scours the social media accounts of student visa holders for purported pro-Hamas sentiment, which the government has conflated with pro-Palestine views.
Free speech advocates note that professing support for both Palestine and Hamas is protected by the First Amendment. Even so, international students have been increasingly careful about what they write or say online, legal advocates for student protesters told The Intercept. The recent arrests have also given international students pause over whether they should remain in the U.S.
During the press conference, Rubio also confirmed Axios reporting that the State Department has already revoked at least 300 student visas.
Rubio said, “We do it every day — every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
There are about 1.5 million student visa holders in the U.S.
After Öztürk’s arrest, DHS passed reporters an unsubstantiated claim that Öztürk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”
Öztürk’s op-ed, however, never mentions Hamas.
Instead, the 800-word opinion piece references mounting evidence of Israel’s violations of international law in its war in Gaza. It criticized the Tufts administration’s double standard of espousing diversity, civic engagement, and the exchange of ideas, but failing to uphold those values in its rejection of the students’ demands.
The piece also pointed to the movement against South African apartheid and Tufts’ decision in 1989 to divest from South Africa “and end its complicity with the then-racist regime.”
Several weeks before publishing the essay, Tufts’ student governing body had passed a series of resolutions, among them a call for the school to disclose and halt all of the university’s investments in companies tied to Israel. Hours after the vote, however, university administrators flatly rejected the resolutions. The following day, more than 150 students responded by holding a rally and die-in on campus.
The Tufts Daily March 26, 2024, opinion piece was a part of the growing campuswide dissent to the university’s rejection of student demands. The discontent would culminate in the school’s Palestinian solidarity encampment, which would last about one month before it was voluntarily dismantled by student activists.
“Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote.
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the op-ed was published, masked plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Öztürk outside of her Somerville, Massachusetts, home as she was on her way to to break her Ramadan fast with friends. Footage of her arrest, which was shared widely online, sparked immediate outrage with many referring to the arrest as “a kidnapping” or an “abduction.” For nearly 24 hours, Öztürk’s family and legal team was unaware of her whereabouts.
In defiance of a federal judge’s order to keep Öztürk in Massachusetts, ICE flew Öztürk to the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a privately run ICE jail, where she remains incarcerated.
Öztürk did not have access to her medications during the flight and suffered an asthma attack, her attorneys said in court filings.
Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper issued an order on Friday preventing the government from deporting Öztürk as the battle for her release plays out in court.
On Wednesday, more than 1,000 people rallied near the Tufts campus to protest the government’s case against Öztürk.
A spokesperson for Öztürk’s legal team defended the 2024 op-ed in a statement Friday and said that Öztürk “is entitled to express her opinions freely.” They added that the DHS has yet to provide any evidence to support their deportation case.
“Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of U.S. supplied bombs being dropped on Gaza killing over 1,000 people, including over 250 children in the last week. It appears the only thing Rumeysa is being targeted for is her right to free speech,” the spokesperson said.
Student journalists at Tufts have also stood firm against the Trump’s administration’s attacks on free speech. The Tufts Daily’s editors published a defense of Öztürk and her role in writing the op-ed.
“Öztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value,” the editors wrote.
While the editors said they were sensitive to the “well-being of our writers and sources,” the paper has no plans of slowing its coverage of Öztürk’s case or future opinion pieces by students.
“That said, the withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” the editors wrote. “In a moment of uncertainty and turmoil, we will continue to defend independent journalism by sharing others’ viewpoints and stories.”
Plainclothes ICE agents detain Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk
While in Georgetown, Guyana, on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter about what led to the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. The reporter mentioned an opinion piece Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024, published in The Tufts Daily, advocating for students’ calls to divest the school from companies with ties to Israel.
Rubio seemed to downplay the influence of the op-ed, written alongside three other Tufts graduate students, instead insinuating without evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, had vandalized her university, occupied buildings, and harassed students.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Government documents included in court filings, however, don’t back up Rubio’s claims of supposed unlawful behavior.
Several days before her arrest on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Öztürk’s student visa without notifying her, according to a DHS document through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, through which Öztürk had obtained her visa.
The government didn’t claim that Öztürk had broken any laws but instead cited a civil law provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The government has made the same argument in detaining former Columbia University student activist leader Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri, as well as in its efforts to arrest Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
In each of these cases, attorneys for the students argued the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and academics over their support for Palestine are ultimately an attack on their free speech rights.
Öztürk’s case is notable in that her detention and possible deportation may very well center on a published piece of journalism.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper,” Öztürk’s attorneys wrote in a habeas petition for her release filed on Friday. “Rümeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others. Indeed, her arrest and detention are part of a concerted and systemic effort by Trump administration officials to punish students and others identified with pro-Palestine activism.”
Activists and free speech advocates have been quick to remind that crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech did not begin with the Trump administration.
Since October 7, 2023, schools have censored, suspended, or fired professors and students over their speech on Palestine and Israel. In response to student encampments, President Joe Biden delivered law-and-order messages to protesters, accusing pro-Palestinian movements of antisemitism.
School administrators regularly called police on student protests, leading to violent arrests. In his statement from jail dictated to lawyers by phone, Khalil blamed Columbia’s administrators for having “laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.”
In the case of Öztürk, such doxing campaigns may have been a factor in her arrest. Attorneys said Öztürk feared for her safety after pro-Israel group Canary Mission posted about her in early February, pointing to her 2024 essay. Canary Mission, which shares personal information about pro-Palestine activists online and is often used by other Zionist groups to dox people, said Öztürk took part in “anti-Israel activism” and cited her 2024 opinion piece as its sole source to back its claim.
While it is not known whether the State Department was aware of the Canary Mission post, right-wing Zionist groups have been willing collaborators in helping direct the administration toward “pro-Hamas” individuals for deportation.
In its “Catch and Revoke” program, the State Department also scours the social media accounts of student visa holders for purported pro-Hamas sentiment, which the government has conflated with pro-Palestine views.
Free speech advocates note that professing support for both Palestine and Hamas is protected by the First Amendment. Even so, international students have been increasingly careful about what they write or say online, legal advocates for student protesters told The Intercept. The recent arrests have also given international students pause over whether they should remain in the U.S.
During the press conference, Rubio also confirmed Axios reporting that the State Department has already revoked at least 300 student visas.
Rubio said, “We do it every day — every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
There are about 1.5 million student visa holders in the U.S.
After Öztürk’s arrest, DHS passed reporters an unsubstantiated claim that Öztürk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”
Öztürk’s op-ed, however, never mentions Hamas.
Instead, the 800-word opinion piece references mounting evidence of Israel’s violations of international law in its war in Gaza. It criticized the Tufts administration’s double standard of espousing diversity, civic engagement, and the exchange of ideas, but failing to uphold those values in its rejection of the students’ demands.
The piece also pointed to the movement against South African apartheid and Tufts’ decision in 1989 to divest from South Africa “and end its complicity with the then-racist regime.”
Several weeks before publishing the essay, Tufts’ student governing body had passed a series of resolutions, among them a call for the school to disclose and halt all of the university’s investments in companies tied to Israel. Hours after the vote, however, university administrators flatly rejected the resolutions. The following day, more than 150 students responded by holding a rally and die-in on campus.
The Tufts Daily March 26, 2024, opinion piece was a part of the growing campuswide dissent to the university’s rejection of student demands. The discontent would culminate in the school’s Palestinian solidarity encampment, which would last about one month before it was voluntarily dismantled by student activists.
“Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote.
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the op-ed was published, masked plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Öztürk outside of her Somerville, Massachusetts, home as she was on her way to to break her Ramadan fast with friends. Footage of her arrest, which was shared widely online, sparked immediate outrage with many referring to the arrest as “a kidnapping” or an “abduction.” For nearly 24 hours, Öztürk’s family and legal team was unaware of her whereabouts.
In defiance of a federal judge’s order to keep Öztürk in Massachusetts, ICE flew Öztürk to the South Louisiana Correctional Center, a privately run ICE jail, where she remains incarcerated.
Öztürk did not have access to her medications during the flight and suffered an asthma attack, her attorneys said in court filings.
Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper issued an order on Friday preventing the government from deporting Öztürk as the battle for her release plays out in court.
On Wednesday, more than 1,000 people rallied near the Tufts campus to protest the government’s case against Öztürk.
A spokesperson for Öztürk’s legal team defended the 2024 op-ed in a statement Friday and said that Öztürk “is entitled to express her opinions freely.” They added that the DHS has yet to provide any evidence to support their deportation case.
“Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of U.S. supplied bombs being dropped on Gaza killing over 1,000 people, including over 250 children in the last week. It appears the only thing Rumeysa is being targeted for is her right to free speech,” the spokesperson said.
Student journalists at Tufts have also stood firm against the Trump’s administration’s attacks on free speech. The Tufts Daily’s editors published a defense of Öztürk and her role in writing the op-ed.
“Öztürk’s contribution is an exercise of free speech — her fulfillment of a fundamental American value,” the editors wrote.
While the editors said they were sensitive to the “well-being of our writers and sources,” the paper has no plans of slowing its coverage of Öztürk’s case or future opinion pieces by students.
“That said, the withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” the editors wrote. “In a moment of uncertainty and turmoil, we will continue to defend independent journalism by sharing others’ viewpoints and stories.”
ICE Got Warrants Under “False Pretenses,” Claims Columbia Student Targeted Over Gaza Protests
The law behind the warrants bars concealment of people in the country illegally, yet the students were legal residents living on campus.
Earlier this month, while hunting for Columbia University students to deport over their ties to Gaza protests, the Trump administration convinced a federal judge to sign off on search warrants for two students’ dorm rooms — then raided the residences with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
As details about the warrants have emerged, however, so have allegations that federal agents misled the court and secured the warrants under “false pretenses,” as one of the students whose room was searched, Yunseo Chung, claimed in a lawsuit challenging her deportation.
The warrants were predicated on probable cause that Columbia was “harboring” students who were in the country illegally, court filings indicate. Chung, however, is a lawful permanent resident, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport her based on her arrest and citation at a Gaza sit-in. She has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old.
“The idea that they went before a federal magistrate judge and said, ‘We have to search Ms. Chung’s residence for evidence of Columbia harboring her’ — that shows they’re willing to lie to a judge,” said Nathan Yaffe, an immigration attorney.
Yaffe represents both Chung and the other Columbia student who was targeted by the search warrants, Ranjani Srinivasan, who left the country in mid-March.
Most of the materials relating to the search warrants remain under seal in federal court, and Columbia declined to comment on them, citing student privacy protections. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the warrants.
“If the government falsified information to get the warrant, that is its own bundle of serious problems,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “But even if not, the basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”
“Harboring and Concealing”?
The search warrants served on Columbia first became public through a late-night statement from the university on March 13, just five days after the jarring arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia apartment building. The school did not include the targeted students’ names, the specific buildings, or the government’s legal justification for searching them.
“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote in her statement. Armstrong emphasized that university protocol “requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas” — which ICE satisfied by serving warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge.
“The University is obligated to comply with the law,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”
The next day, a top Justice Department official bragged about the unsuccessful raid in a speech. His remarks offered the first clues about the story the Trump administration told the federal judge who signed the warrants.
“Just last night we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” said Todd Blanche, the U.S. deputy attorney general. Blanche offered no evidence in his speech to support the allegation against the university.
The federal anti-harboring statute makes it a crime to knowingly conceal noncitizens who are in the country illegally. Like many of the country’s laws around immigration, the anti-harboring provision is written in broad language, which the Trump administration has wielded to threaten legal aid organizations and other groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights.
Broad as the language is, however, the law still has concrete requirements. First, the people being “harbored” must lack legal status to be in the U.S. And “harboring” requires some sort of active concealment or obstruction, as opposed to simply declining to assist ICE in deportation.
Courts have differed in their particular definitions, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose precedent is binding in New York federal courts, has ruled that a conviction for “harboring” requires “conduct tending substantially to facilitate an alien’s remaining in the United States illegally and to prevent government authorities from detecting his unlawful presence.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has not defined “harboring,” but in 2023 it interpreted other parts of the same statute to require proof of the defendant’s specific intent to break the law.
The typical case under the harboring statute involves active concealment to help people who are undocumented or who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge to avoid being located by ICE, explained David Leopold, an immigration attorney. He contrasted that active concealment with sanctuary churches that have welcomed undocumented people to live in their facilities, which offered some protection against ICE raids.
“The reason the churches weren’t charged with harboring,” Leopold said, “was that it was open and obvious that the person was living there. They weren’t hiding them surreptitiously.”
“Legal Impossibility”
When federal agents sought search warrants targeting Srinivasan and Chung’s residences, the anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification they offered to support probable cause of a federal crime, according to a copy of one of the warrants filed with Chung’s lawsuit.
So far, the government hasn’t offered evidence, at least not publicly, that Columbia was taking any active steps to obstruct ICE or conceal anyone on its campus. More fundamentally, both Chung and Srinivasan came to the U.S. entirely lawfully, and neither had appeared before an immigration judge, much less received a deportation order.
On March 5, Srinivasan learned that the State Department was revoking her student visa in an email from the U.S. consulate in India. In the following days, ICE agents visited her apartment building at Columbia twice without a warrant, threatening through the door to keep coming back until they put her in deportation proceedings.
On March 11, after Columbia informed Srinivasan that she had been withdrawn from enrollment because of her revoked visa and urged her to meet with immigration agents, she boarded a flight to Canada rather than fight her deportation. ICE was apparently unaware that Srinivasan was no longer in the U.S. when three agents searched her room two days later.
“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics and documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” a masked ICE agent explained to Srinivasan’s roommate, according to video reviewed by The Intercept. Before leaving, the agent identified himself as special agent Brian Carlucci and left her a copy of the search warrant, which he signed.
ICE did not follow the proper steps to revoke Srinivasan’s legal status in the country, Yaffe told The Intercept, which means she was always in the country lawfully.
“In my view it was unfounded to seek to execute a warrant for ‘harboring’ her,” Yaffe said, That “layer of pretext is not as clearcut” for Srinivasan as it was for Chung, he said, given the latter’s green card.
Chung and her attorneys first heard from DHS agents on March 9 that the State Department had determined she should be deported under the same arcane legal provision that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked against Khalil, who also has a green card.
On Thursday, Rubio told reporters he had revoked more than 300 students’ visas so far, and was finding new ones to revoke daily.
Whatever power Rubio may have to revoke visas and green cards over otherwise protected speech — which is currently being tested in numerous lawsuits by students who have been detained or threatened with deportation — his pronouncements do not immediately transform a lawful resident into an unlawful one, Chung’s attorneys told a federal court on Tuesday.
“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise,” attorney Ramzi Kassem said at the hearing. “And as long as she’s a permanent resident, she cannot be ‘harbored.’ The statute does not apply to her.”
Chung’s court filings did not include the more detailed affidavits that the agents submitted to federal Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger on March 13, which remain under seal.
“I can’t imagine what truthfully could have been said in those affidavits to make the harboring statute relevant,” Colangelo-Bryan said.
Chung’s lawsuit asserts the warrants were “obtained on false pretenses” and were just pretext to get close enough to arrest her and Srinivasan. In their warrant application, the government indicated to the judge that agents were searching for records related to the students’ “affiliation with Columbia University,” such as lease agreements, student conduct materials, and communications with the school.
ICE executed both warrants at Columbia between 9 and 10 p.m. on March 13, according to court filings. Yet they didn’t seize anything during their searches.
“It’s clear that they that they were not actually searching for anything relating to those documents,” Yaffe said, “leaving aside that it’s a legal impossibility to ‘harbor’ Ms. Chung.”
Other attorneys have been even more strident than Chung’s legal team in demanding answers about how the warrants were issued.
“Excuse the profanity, but this is absolutely fucking insane,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post, “and such a clear overreach that I can’t believe a magistrate judge authorized a warrant here.”
After the hearing on Tuesday, a different federal judge, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the District Court, issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from detaining Chung or moving her out of the state, as ICE did with Khalil and other student activists.
Buchwald’s order did not address Chung’s allegations about the search warrants, although she noted in the hearing that she had pulled the government’s affidavit from court files and was reviewing it.
The law behind the warrants bars concealment of people in the country illegally, yet the students were legal residents living on campus.
March 29, 2025
Source: The Intercept
Earlier this month, while hunting for Columbia University students to deport over their ties to Gaza protests, the Trump administration convinced a federal judge to sign off on search warrants for two students’ dorm rooms — then raided the residences with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
As details about the warrants have emerged, however, so have allegations that federal agents misled the court and secured the warrants under “false pretenses,” as one of the students whose room was searched, Yunseo Chung, claimed in a lawsuit challenging her deportation.
The warrants were predicated on probable cause that Columbia was “harboring” students who were in the country illegally, court filings indicate. Chung, however, is a lawful permanent resident, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport her based on her arrest and citation at a Gaza sit-in. She has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old.
“The idea that they went before a federal magistrate judge and said, ‘We have to search Ms. Chung’s residence for evidence of Columbia harboring her’ — that shows they’re willing to lie to a judge,” said Nathan Yaffe, an immigration attorney.
Yaffe represents both Chung and the other Columbia student who was targeted by the search warrants, Ranjani Srinivasan, who left the country in mid-March.
Most of the materials relating to the search warrants remain under seal in federal court, and Columbia declined to comment on them, citing student privacy protections. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the warrants.
“If the government falsified information to get the warrant, that is its own bundle of serious problems,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney at Human Rights First who also represents Chung. “But even if not, the basis for this entire operation is constitutionally invalid.”
“Harboring and Concealing”?
The search warrants served on Columbia first became public through a late-night statement from the university on March 13, just five days after the jarring arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia apartment building. The school did not include the targeted students’ names, the specific buildings, or the government’s legal justification for searching them.
“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight,” Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote in her statement. Armstrong emphasized that university protocol “requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas” — which ICE satisfied by serving warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge.
“The University is obligated to comply with the law,” Armstrong wrote. “No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.”
The next day, a top Justice Department official bragged about the unsuccessful raid in a speech. His remarks offered the first clues about the story the Trump administration told the federal judge who signed the warrants.
“Just last night we worked with the Department of Homeland Security to execute search warrants from an investigation into Columbia University for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus,” said Todd Blanche, the U.S. deputy attorney general. Blanche offered no evidence in his speech to support the allegation against the university.
The federal anti-harboring statute makes it a crime to knowingly conceal noncitizens who are in the country illegally. Like many of the country’s laws around immigration, the anti-harboring provision is written in broad language, which the Trump administration has wielded to threaten legal aid organizations and other groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights.
Broad as the language is, however, the law still has concrete requirements. First, the people being “harbored” must lack legal status to be in the U.S. And “harboring” requires some sort of active concealment or obstruction, as opposed to simply declining to assist ICE in deportation.
Courts have differed in their particular definitions, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose precedent is binding in New York federal courts, has ruled that a conviction for “harboring” requires “conduct tending substantially to facilitate an alien’s remaining in the United States illegally and to prevent government authorities from detecting his unlawful presence.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has not defined “harboring,” but in 2023 it interpreted other parts of the same statute to require proof of the defendant’s specific intent to break the law.
The typical case under the harboring statute involves active concealment to help people who are undocumented or who have been ordered deported by an immigration judge to avoid being located by ICE, explained David Leopold, an immigration attorney. He contrasted that active concealment with sanctuary churches that have welcomed undocumented people to live in their facilities, which offered some protection against ICE raids.
“The reason the churches weren’t charged with harboring,” Leopold said, “was that it was open and obvious that the person was living there. They weren’t hiding them surreptitiously.”
“Legal Impossibility”
When federal agents sought search warrants targeting Srinivasan and Chung’s residences, the anti-harboring statute was the sole legal justification they offered to support probable cause of a federal crime, according to a copy of one of the warrants filed with Chung’s lawsuit.
So far, the government hasn’t offered evidence, at least not publicly, that Columbia was taking any active steps to obstruct ICE or conceal anyone on its campus. More fundamentally, both Chung and Srinivasan came to the U.S. entirely lawfully, and neither had appeared before an immigration judge, much less received a deportation order.
On March 5, Srinivasan learned that the State Department was revoking her student visa in an email from the U.S. consulate in India. In the following days, ICE agents visited her apartment building at Columbia twice without a warrant, threatening through the door to keep coming back until they put her in deportation proceedings.
On March 11, after Columbia informed Srinivasan that she had been withdrawn from enrollment because of her revoked visa and urged her to meet with immigration agents, she boarded a flight to Canada rather than fight her deportation. ICE was apparently unaware that Srinivasan was no longer in the U.S. when three agents searched her room two days later.
“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics and documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” a masked ICE agent explained to Srinivasan’s roommate, according to video reviewed by The Intercept. Before leaving, the agent identified himself as special agent Brian Carlucci and left her a copy of the search warrant, which he signed.
ICE did not follow the proper steps to revoke Srinivasan’s legal status in the country, Yaffe told The Intercept, which means she was always in the country lawfully.
“In my view it was unfounded to seek to execute a warrant for ‘harboring’ her,” Yaffe said, That “layer of pretext is not as clearcut” for Srinivasan as it was for Chung, he said, given the latter’s green card.
Chung and her attorneys first heard from DHS agents on March 9 that the State Department had determined she should be deported under the same arcane legal provision that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked against Khalil, who also has a green card.
On Thursday, Rubio told reporters he had revoked more than 300 students’ visas so far, and was finding new ones to revoke daily.
Whatever power Rubio may have to revoke visas and green cards over otherwise protected speech — which is currently being tested in numerous lawsuits by students who have been detained or threatened with deportation — his pronouncements do not immediately transform a lawful resident into an unlawful one, Chung’s attorneys told a federal court on Tuesday.
“No matter what Secretary Rubio says, she remains a permanent resident until the immigration court decides otherwise,” attorney Ramzi Kassem said at the hearing. “And as long as she’s a permanent resident, she cannot be ‘harbored.’ The statute does not apply to her.”
Chung’s court filings did not include the more detailed affidavits that the agents submitted to federal Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger on March 13, which remain under seal.
“I can’t imagine what truthfully could have been said in those affidavits to make the harboring statute relevant,” Colangelo-Bryan said.
Chung’s lawsuit asserts the warrants were “obtained on false pretenses” and were just pretext to get close enough to arrest her and Srinivasan. In their warrant application, the government indicated to the judge that agents were searching for records related to the students’ “affiliation with Columbia University,” such as lease agreements, student conduct materials, and communications with the school.
ICE executed both warrants at Columbia between 9 and 10 p.m. on March 13, according to court filings. Yet they didn’t seize anything during their searches.
“It’s clear that they that they were not actually searching for anything relating to those documents,” Yaffe said, “leaving aside that it’s a legal impossibility to ‘harbor’ Ms. Chung.”
Other attorneys have been even more strident than Chung’s legal team in demanding answers about how the warrants were issued.
“Excuse the profanity, but this is absolutely fucking insane,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post, “and such a clear overreach that I can’t believe a magistrate judge authorized a warrant here.”
After the hearing on Tuesday, a different federal judge, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the District Court, issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from detaining Chung or moving her out of the state, as ICE did with Khalil and other student activists.
Buchwald’s order did not address Chung’s allegations about the search warrants, although she noted in the hearing that she had pulled the government’s affidavit from court files and was reviewing it.
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