President Donald Trump says he is determined to deport "terrorist sympathizers," including legal permanent residents as well as foreigners with student visas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the targets have a history of "tearing things up" on "our university campuses" by starting riots, taking over buildings, and harassing people.
While those descriptions seem accurate as applied to at least some of the foreign students whom Rubio wants to expel, they are less apt in other cases. Contrary to the way Trump and Rubio portray this initiative, neither rhetorical support for terrorism nor disruptive conduct is necessary to invoke the sweeping legal authority on which they are relying, which applies to any noncitizen whose "presence or activities" Rubio thinks could have "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences."
The contrast between Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian graduate student at Cornell University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, illustrates the startling breadth of that provision. Taal, who is challenging his deportation and so far has avoided detention, has explicitly endorsed terrorism as a form of justifiable "resistance" and has engaged in disruptive protests. But neither seems to be true of Ozturk, who was arrested last week on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked immigration agents and is being held at a detention center in Louisiana.
