Week of March 26 – April 1, 2025

Immigration agents detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the evening of March 25. The State Department had revoked her F-1 student visa.

Video of the arrest showed masked and plainclothes officers taking her into custody. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said authorities determined Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas” but did not specify what those activities were. A year earlier she had co-authored an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Her lawyer filed suit the same night arguing the detention was unlawful. Supporters described it as the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student over pro-Palestinian activism.

Source: Reuters

A Tennessee House committee voted 11 to 7 on March 26 to advance a bill allowing public school districts to refuse enrollment to children who cannot prove lawful immigration status. Three Republicans joined the committee’s four Democrats in voting no.

The measure, HB793 and SB836, is sponsored by Senator Bo Watson and House Majority Leader William Lamberth. Districts could choose to verify immigration status and either charge tuition to students who cannot show legal residency or decline to enroll them. An amendment adopted that day made the checks optional rather than mandatory and exempted refused students from state truancy law.

Both sponsors have said they hope the bill becomes a test case for the Supreme Court to revisit Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 decision holding that children have a right to public education regardless of immigration status.

Source: Tennessee Lookout

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 27 that the department may have revoked more than 300 visas, telling reporters in Guyana, “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day.”

Speaking later on his flight back to Washington, Rubio said the revocations covered a mix of student and visitor visas and that he had signed every action himself. He said visas would be withdrawn from students who took part in conduct such as vandalizing universities, harassing students or occupying buildings.

Rubio confirmed the department revoked the visa of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts doctoral student detained days earlier, but declined to describe what she had done. He said the material presented to him met a standard covering people supportive of movements that run counter to U.S. foreign policy.

Source: Reuters

The State Department instructed consular posts to expand screening of student visa applicants, according to a March 25 cable obtained by the Guardian. The directive covers new and renewing F, M and J applications.

It sets out a ground for refusal based on evidence that an applicant “advocates for terrorist activity, or otherwise demonstrates a degree of public approval or public advocacy for terrorist activity or a terrorist organization.” Consular officers are told to conduct mandatory reviews of applicants’ social media accounts.

Fraud prevention units receiving flagged applications are instructed to take screenshots of potentially derogatory posts and upload them to the case record, preserving the material even if the posts are later edited or deleted. The cable, sent under Rubio’s name, says the vetting should also reach students already in the United States.

Source: The Guardian

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued a nationwide temporary restraining order barring the government from deporting people to countries where they have no ties without first giving them a chance to argue they would face persecution or torture there.

The order covers people under final removal orders who could be sent to a third country other than the one identified during their immigration proceedings. It came in a lawsuit challenging a February 18 Immigration and Customs Enforcement directive telling officers to review the cases of migrants released from detention, including those complying with their release conditions, for re-detention and removal to a third country.

The administration appealed within hours. A Justice Department spokesperson said no unelected judge should be allowed to usurp executive power on matters of national security.

Source: Reuters

The administration asked the Supreme Court on March 28 to lift a lower court order blocking deportations carried out under the Alien Enemies Act. The request came a day after a federal appeals court upheld that block.

Trump invoked the 1798 wartime statute on March 15, asserting that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had infiltrated the United States. The law allows the government to expel foreign nationals without the hearings normally required in removal cases, and a district judge in Washington temporarily halted the flights.

The emergency filing argued that the order forces the country to “harbor individuals whom national-security officials have identified as members of a foreign terrorist organization.” The ACLU, lead counsel for the men, said it would urge the court to preserve the status quo so that no one else is sent to a foreign prison without process.

Source: The Guardian

Private organizations are assembling names of foreign students and faculty involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests and passing them to federal immigration authorities, the Associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the group Betar said Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University activist arrested earlier in March, topped a list of students and faculty from nine universities that it submitted to officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Other groups circulated links to the ICE tip line and urged followers to file complaints against foreign students and faculty.

Some of the groups have used facial recognition software to identify protesters from photographs, a practice an attorney in a related lawsuit said had previously been left largely to law enforcement. Asked how the names reached his desk, Rubio declined to describe the process, saying the department was looking for more people.

Source: AP News

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco paused the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, a week before the protections were due to lapse on April 7. The order applies nationwide.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had reversed extensions granted under the Biden administration, affecting about 350,000 people in one group, with an estimated 250,000 more set to lose status in September. Chen wrote that the action threatened irreparable harm to hundreds of thousands of people and that the government had identified no real countervailing harm in continuing the protections.

He said the plaintiffs, led by the National TPS Alliance, were likely to show the decision was unauthorized by law and arbitrary and capricious. The government was given one week to file notice of appeal.

Source: NPR

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it had received enough electronic registrations to reach the fiscal year 2026 H-1B cap, including the advanced degree exemption, and had completed the random selection.

Employers with selected registrations were notified through their online accounts, which display the registration status. Only a petitioner holding a selection notice for a given beneficiary may file a cap-subject H-1B petition for fiscal 2026.

Filing opened on April 1, 2025, and the agency said the window shown on each selection notice would run at least 90 days. Petitions must include a copy of the selection notice and evidence of the passport or travel document the beneficiary used at registration.

Source: USCIS

A survey by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found immigration to be the strongest issue in President Trump’s second-term job ratings. About half of adults approved of his handling of immigration, a larger share than during his first term.

By comparison, 40 percent approved of his handling of the economy, the lowest reading on that question since December 2017. Around 40 percent approved of his handling of trade negotiations, the federal government, Social Security and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Immigration was also his strongest issue among Democrats, 18 percent of whom approved of his approach. The poll was conducted March 20 to 24 with 1,229 adults and carries a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Source: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research

The Texas Senate passed Senate Bill 8 on a 20 to 11 vote. It would require sheriffs in counties with more than 100,000 residents to request a 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the program that trains and deputizes local officers to carry out certain immigration enforcement functions.

The bill, filed by Republican Senators Joan Huffman and Charles Schwertner, would create a $20 million grant fund for sheriff’s offices in counties with fewer than 1 million residents, covering costs such as holding people in jail on suspected immigration violations.

It would also allow the state attorney general to sue a sheriff who does not comply. An amendment directs such suits to the sheriff’s own county rather than Travis County, where cases against government are usually filed.

Source: The Texas Tribune

Immigration and Customs Enforcement acknowledged in a court filing that it deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland man with protected legal status, to El Salvador through an “administrative error.”

Abrego Garcia was arrested in Baltimore on March 12, after a shift as a sheet metal apprentice and while picking up his 5-year-old son, and was sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, the prison known as CECOT. His wife identified him in photographs from the prison by his tattoos and scars.

The government argued against returning him, citing alleged ties to MS-13 and its lack of authority over El Salvador. His lawyers say he has no gang affiliation and that the government “has never produced an iota of evidence” that he does. The allegation stems from a 2019 arrest in Maryland.

Source: AP News