State Department Memo on Abducted Tufts Student Exposes Rubio’s Lies

The Department of Homeland Security had no evidence linking a Tufts University international student to terrorism or antisemitism—but ICE agents kidnapped her anyway.

A few days before Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student attending Tufts University, was detained by masked immigrations and customs enforcement agents last month, a memo from the State Department concluded that she had not engaged in antisemitic activities or made any statements in support of terrorism, The Washington Post reported Monday. 

Along with the lack of evidence against the 30-year-old Ph.D. student, the State Department noted that Öztürk’s name was not associated with any terrorism-related information across U.S. databases. The department recommended that her F-1 student visa not be revoked.

Öztürk was originally targeted by the Department of Homeland Security because she co-authored an op-ed last spring urging Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A memo from a DHS official obtained by the Post claims that Öztürk engaged in “anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”

The DHS justified her detainment under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the deportation of any noncitizen who engages in activities that could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” like writing for the school paper, apparently.  

A video of Öztürk’s kidnapping outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, showed her being taken away by masked ICE agents and escorted into a gray SUV, a disturbing visual representative of Trump’s crackdown on legal immigrants’ civil liberties. Her arrest sparked outrage and criticism across the country, and is part of a larger assault from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the rights of international students. Since Trump took office in January, more than 600 international students have had their visas revoked.

Öztürk has since been detained at a Louisiana detention facility, where she’s described the conditions as “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.” Despite the lack of evidence against her, she could still be deported solely under Rubio’s discretion, without the need for justification, under a different section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Her federal court hearing is scheduled for Monday in Vermont.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may have given up the game on Donald Trump’s tariffs, and members of the administration are seriously pissed.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced that smartphones, computers, and other tech devices would be exempt from the steep tariffs on Chinese products announced earlier this month that reached a whopping 145 percent.

During an appearance on ABC News’s This Week Sunday morning, Lutnick confirmed that tariffs on certain electronics had been suspended—but only temporarily.

“So you’re saying that the big tariffs on things like smartphones and laptops, iPhones—all those iPhones built in China—that those tariffs are temporarily off, but they’re going to be coming right back on in another form in a month or so?” asked host Jonathan Karl. “Or what—what are you saying?”

“Correct, that—that’s right. That’s right,” Lutnick replied. “Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to re-shore, to be built in America.”

Lutnick added that those products would be “included in the semiconductor tariffs that are coming, and the pharmaceuticals are coming. Those two areas are coming in the next month or two.”

“So this is not like a permanent sort of exemption. [Trump is] just clarifying that these are not available to be negotiated away by countries. These are things that are national security, that we need to be made in America,” Lutnick said.

Just hours later, Fox News’s senior business correspondent Charles Gasparino reported that Lutnick’s apparent break with the White House had ruffled some feathers.

“There is significant division inside the @WhiteHouse over @howardlutnick’s comments on the temporary nature of the tariff exemptions, an apparent 180 from where the world thought the trade negotiations were going, sources tell me,” Gasparino wrote.

“Of course the only opinion that really matters in the president’s but I am told plenty of people really believe he is ‘off message’ of trying to create a trade regime that involves negotiations even with China and actions that don’t roil the markets including the all important bond market,” he added, noting that the story was still developing.

Lutnick was already one of the least well-liked members of Trump’s inner circle, having defeated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the ideas war to impose the president’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs. Those within the administration seriously doubt he believes everything he spouts about Trump’s maximalist tariff policy.

In a post later Sunday afternoon, Trump claimed that there were exemptions in his trade war. “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket,’” he wrote on Truth Social.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller confirmed that electronics would still be subject to the 20 percent tariff that Trump had imposed on China, for failing to address fentanyl trafficking.

Trump’s apparent tariff rollback continued to roil the stock market Monday, as experts fretted over a trend of rapid de-dollarization in the market.

The European Commission is issuing burner phones to officials traveling to the United States amid fears of espionage in Trump’s America.

It’s the kind of security measure typically saved for trips to China or Ukraine, where the fear of IT surveillance is high. But three European Commissioners will test out burner phones and basic laptops at International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington next week, sources told the Financial Times.

The move from the European Commission, the primary executive arm of the European Union, marks a new era of American-European relations, which have all but dissipated since Donald Trump took office in January. Last month, he slapped Europe with 20 percent tariffs, which he later reduced to 10 percent for 90 days. He has falsely claimed the EU was formed solely to “create a unified force against” the United States, he abandoned Ukraine in the face of Russia, and he threatened to withdraw American security guarantees to the continent altogether—single-handedly dismantling an alliance that has shaped the global order since Word War II, and simultaneously embracing Vladimir Putin’s alliance.

“The transatlantic alliance is over,” an EU official told the Financial Times.

The Commission did not confirm the issuing of burner phones to the Financial Times, but it did say that all EU officials traveling to the U.S. were told to turn off their phones and hide them in “special sleeves” at the border amid a rise in phone seizures from border agents in recent weeks. A number of tourists and visiting academics have been turned away for having criticism of the White House on their phone.

More than half of Europeans now consider Trump an “enemy of Europe,” according to a survey conducted across nine European countries last month. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they thought Trump “acted like a dictator,” and only one in 10 respondents believed they could rely on American security and defense if armed conflict arises in the near future, yet another indication of dwindling trust in Trump’s America.

Donald Trump worked himself into a frenzy after watching CBS’s 60 Minutes
on Sunday, calling for the network to be penalized in a Truth Social post. 

“They should lose their license! Hopefully, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as headed by its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior,” Trump posted. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

It’s Trump’s latest complaint about CBS, which he is already suing in a $20 billion defamation suit, claiming that the network deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look better before last year’s election. The FCC is also investigating the network over Harris’s interview.

Trump’s latest tantrum is over two segments on the show Sunday. The first was an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which correspondent Scott Pelley traveled to the site of a Russian attack earlier this month that killed nine children. The second was a report from Greenland by correspondent Jon Wertheim on how people in the Danish territory are receiving Trump’s threats to take over the island.  

The president is trying to intimidate news networks that produce even the slightest bit of critical coverage against him, threatening lawsuits and FCC action. He has also threatened other news outlets, such as ABC and NBC, with ABC even capitulating with a legal settlement before Trump took office. In a presidential term already full of abuses of power, hopefully the free press in America continues to report critically of the Trump administration, otherwise they’ll be paving the way for autocracy.

Donald Trump’s administration has a new excuse for violating an order from the Supreme Court to return a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

In a seven-page filing Sunday, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued that the federal courts did not have the authority to order the executive branch to “conduct foreign relations” with another country, by facilitating the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father in Maryland who was deported to El Salvador despite having received a protective order prohibiting his removal there.

The lawyers argued that the department could not be compelled to actually “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia because “reading ‘facilitate’ as requiring something more than domestic measures would not only flout the Supreme Court’s order but also violate the separation of powers. The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations.”

Instead, the Justice Department was choosing to understand “facilitate” as “taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here.”

The government argued that the court could not compel it to make demands of El Salvador’s government, dispatch U.S. personnel, or send aircraft into foreign airspace.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered the government to report “what it can” about its ongoing efforts to return Abrego Garcia, and ordered the government to provide daily updates about its progress. In a separate filing, the government confirmed that Abrego Garcia was “alive and secure,” but in its filing Sunday, it argued it could not be compelled to report information on the case.

The government claimed Xinis’s request was “particularly inappropriate given that such discovery could interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions—particularly in the context of President [Nayib] Bukele’s ongoing trip to the United States.”

Bukele, who struck a $6 million deal with Trump to house alleged gang members the U.S. government wishes to deport, arrived in the U.S. Sunday, according to the filing.

Last week, the DOJ presented another flimsy argument for not returning Abrego Garcia, ominously claiming that the government of El Salvador might have its own reasons for keeping him.