(MERIDIAN, IDAHO) — A 70-year-old man was charged with aggravated assault after allegedly striking a counter-protester with his vehicle outside a Tesla dealership in Idaho, law enforcement said.
About 30 people attended an anti-Tesla rally on Saturday outside a dealership in Meridian, a gathering that drew a counter-protest of about 200 others, the Meridian Police Department said in a press release.
Tesla vehicles and dealerships have in recent weeks become targets for vandalism and protests, as the carmaker’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has taken on a prominent and divisive role in President Donald Trump’s second administration.
An anti-Musk group had called for a series of “Tesla Takedown” protests to be held this weekend at dealerships and other Tesla facilities throughout the country, including the dealership in Meridian.
As a 49-year-old man arrived at the Idaho rally, Christopher Talbot, 70, of Meridian, allegedly “made an obscene gesture” toward him and then struck him with his car, police said. Officials identified the man who was struck as a counter-protester, saying he had non-life-threatening injuries and that he drove himself to a nearby hospital.
“Reports indicate the victim had been driving a truck with pro-Trump flags and had just parked and exited his vehicle when Talbot struck him with his car,” police said.
Police used the license plate from Talbot’s vehicle to find his home, where he was later arrested. Talbot was booked into Ada County Jail and charged with one count of aggravated battery, a felony, according to the Ada County Sheriff’s Office.
“The Meridian Police Department reminds people to respect everyone’s right to protest and express their 1st Amendment Rights without resorting to violence,” the police department said in a statement.
(LONDON) — Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime after a Russian drone struck a military hospital in Kharkiv overnight.
Ukraine’s General Staff said the strikes were a “deliberate, targeted striking” of the hospital and that it appeared soldiers being treated there were injured. It said the medical center and nearby residential buildings were damaged as a result of a “defeat of” a Russian Shahed drone.
Photos from the scene appear to show damage to the hospital, with an entrance way demolished.
Russian drones also hit apartment blocks and a shopping mall in the center of Ukraine’s second largest city, killing at least two people and wounding 25, according to Kharkiv’s governor.
“War crimes have no statute of limitations. The relevant evidence will be transferred to the bodies of international criminal justice,” the General Staff wrote in a statement on the hospital attack.
Ukrainian cites are bombed by dozens of Russian drones every night, and this weekend has seen a particularly intense wave of attacks in civilian areas of major cities. Dnipro in southeast Ukraine suffered on Friday night heavy strikes that started major fires.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said over the past week Russia had launched over 1,000 drones, nine missiles and over 1,300 guided aerial bombs, with most of Ukraine’s regions coming under attack. He said Ukraine had shot down a “significant number” of the drones and missiles.
“Russia is dragging out the war,” Zelenskyy wrote in a statement on X, saying Ukraine had shared information on Russia’s strikes with its allies and that it expects a “response from the United States, Europe and all our allies to this terror against our people.”
Russia has also intensified its ground offensive operations in recent days amid, according to Ukraine’s military, amid the ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to end the war.
Ukraine’s General Staff as well as Ukrainian military analysts report in the past few days Russia has launched some of the largest number of ground assaults since the start of the year.
“The number of enemy assaults has exceeded 200 times per day for the last three days,” Deep State, a blog account that tracks the war and is close to Ukraine’s military, wrote Friday. This is the highest three-day intensity of the year.”
It follows warnings this week by Zelenskyy that Russia is preparing to launch a major spring offensive, even as it tries to drag out negotiations with the Trump administration.
The Russian attacks are focused most of all in eastern Ukraine, in the direction of Pokrovsk, an important defensive hub that Russia has been trying to seize for more than 6 months.
Russian forces had scaled back their attacks in recent weeks in part due to poor ground conditions and apparently also worn down by extremely heavy losses. But it appears they are now renewing their offensive operations.
Ukrainian and western officials warned that President Vladimir Putin of Russia will try to use protracted negotiations as an opportunity to also advance on the battlefield, hoping to crack Ukraine’s defenses as the Trump administration weakens western support for Kyiv.
A red giant star and white dwarf orbit each other in this animation of a nova similar to T Coronae Borealis. Image via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.
(NEW YORK) — The once-in-a-lifetime explosion of T Coronae Borealis, also known as the “Blaze Star,” is still pending — but the event will be occurring soon, according to astronomers.
Stargazers watched the skies with bated breath on Thursday night in hopes that T Coronae Borealis, a system consisting of a hot, red giant star and a cool, white dwarf star about 3,000 light-years away, would be visible with the naked eye once the explosion occurred.
In June, NASA predicted that the Blaze Star could explode before September. Another prediction came in October, when astronomers at the Paris Observatory predicted that the explosion would happen on March 27, 2025.
Now that those dates have come and gone, viewers have zeroed in on later predictions, including Nov. 10, June 25, 2026, and Feb. 8, 2027.
It is difficult to predict the exact date of explosion, Louisiana State University physics and astronomy professor Bradley Schaefer, told ABC News last year.
The explosion of T Coronae Borealis, a recurring NOVA, only happens once every 79 to 80 years, according to NASA. It is one of 10 known recurring novas in the Milky Way that erupt on timescales of less than a century.
The last recorded outburst was in 1946. When it explodes, it will be in the top 50 brightest stars in the night sky, astronomers say.
“It’s going to be one of the brightest stars in the sky,” Schaefer said.
Since March 2023, the Blaze Star has displayed a pre-eruption dip in brightness, typically a sign that an outburst is imminent, according to the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
It is typically far too dim to see with the unaided eye at a magnitude +10, according to NASA, but it will jump to a magnitude +2 during the explosion.
The Blaze Star is located in the Northern Crown, a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, according to NASA. Once the explosion occurs, viewers can look for it between the bright stars of Vega and Arcturus.
ABC News’ Leah Sarnoff contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — The American embassy in Syria has warned all U.S. citizens to leave the country due to “the increased possibility of attacks” during the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of March, which marks the end of Ramadan in the Muslim world.
The embassy posted a notice to its website late on Friday cautioning citizens of potential attacks targeting “embassies, international organizations and Syrian public institutions” in the Syrian capital Damascus.
“Methods of attack could include, but are not limited to, individual attackers, armed gunmen, or the use of explosive devices,” the embassy notice said. “Leave Syria now,” it added.
The State Department’s current travel advisory for Syria is at level 4 — its highest alert meaning Americans are advised not to travel to the country for any reason.
“This advisory remains in effect due to the significant risks of terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, hostage-taking, armed conflict and unjust detention,” the embassy said in its latest notice.
The U.S. embassy in Damascus suspended operations in 2012 shortly after civil war erupted between former President Bashar Assad’s regime and a patchwork of rebel groups. Assad was deposed late last year by a collection of opposition forces led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group. HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa is now Syria’s interim president.
“The U.S. government is unable to provide any routine or emergency consular services to U.S. citizens in Syria,” the embassy wrote. “The Czech Republic serves as the protecting power for U.S. interests in Syria.”
“U.S. citizens in Syria who are in need of emergency assistance should contact the U.S. Interests Section of the Embassy of the Czech Republic,” it added.
A photo released by the Department of Homeland Security of the first flight of migrants who were part of Tren de Aragua, preparing to takeoff for Guantanamo Bay, Feb. 4, 2025. Via DHS.
(WASHINGTON) — The southwestern border mission and the detention operations at Guantanamo Bay have cost close to $330 million through mid-March, according to a U.S. official familiar with information briefed to Congress, as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration in the United States.
The deportation flights and detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, which only held a few hundred detainees at its peak, have cost nearly $40 million of that total.
There are only a few dozen deported migrants currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.
The estimated costs of the operations at the border and at Guantanamo Bay have not been previously reported.
The costs of the southwestern border operation are expected to continue to rise now that additional active-duty forces have continued to move to the border, where there are now more than 10,000 active duty troops as part of the mission on the border with Mexico.
Additional costs will likely include those associated with the new deployments of two U.S. Navy destroyers to that mission.
As of March 12, 2025, the military services had provided a total of $328.5 million in support for the border mission, including deportation flights and deployments to the border, according to a U.S. official familiar with the information briefed to Congress. Of that total, $289.2 million was for border security operations and $39.3 million was for the operations at Guantanamo Bay.
The cost at Guantanamo Bay is extremely high given the only several hundred detainees have been sent there — even though Trump had said tent cities there could hold as many as 30,000 deported migrants.
“There’s a lot of space to accommodate a lot of people,” Trump said of using Guantanamo Bay to house migrants on Feb. 4 after he signed an executive order to send migrants there on Jan. 29. “So we’re going to use it. … I’d like to get them out. It would be all subject to the laws of our land, and we’re looking at that to see if we can.”
Detainees with criminal records were housed at the detention facility that had been used to house enemy combatants from the War on Terror, and others were placed at the Migrant Operations Center that could only house 50 migrants.
Plans called for a tent city adjoining that migrant facility to be built that could house the numbers mentioned by Trump and other senior administration officials.
However, operations have come nowhere close to that as the phased construction initially envisioned building tent facilities for 2,500 people — but only 195 tents capable of housing 500 people have been built. And they have not been used at all because they did not meet U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention standards, such as including air conditioning.
On Friday, a delegation of Senate Democrats visited the migrant detention operations at Guantanamo Bay and later criticized what they called the “scale and wastefulness of the Trump Administration’s misuse of our military.”
“The staggering financial cost to fly these immigrants out of the United States and detain them at Guantanamo Bay — a mission worth tens of millions of dollars a month — is an insult to American taxpayers,” Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who sponsored the visit, said in a statement.
“President Trump could implement his immigration policies for a fraction of the cost by using existing ICE facilities in the U.S., but he is obsessed with the image of using Guantanamo, no matter the cost,” it added.
ICE has its own fleet of chartered aircraft that are used for deportation flights that cost about $8,577 an hour, according to its website. In contrast, the flights to Guantanamo Bay were conducted on C-130Js and C-17s.
The U.S. Transportation Command said it costs $20,000 per flight hour for C-130Js and $28,500 per flight hour for C-17s — and a one-way flight Guantanamo from El Paso, Texas is about 4 1/2 hours on a C-17 and six hours on a C-130J, allowing costs to add up quickly.
U.S. Transportation Command has also carried out deportation flights to Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, India and Panama. The most recent military flight occurred on Friday, when a military deportation flight landed in Guatemala.
ABC News reported last week that 21 deported migrants had been sent to Guantanamo Bay aboard a civilian flight coordinated by ICE, the first detainees to arrive there since the earlier removal of all 41 detainees at Guantanamo Bay to a detention center in Louisiana.
In late February, the 178 detainees at Guantanamo Bay at that time were flown out, with 176 returning to their home country of Venezuela and two others returned to the United States.
(WASHINGTON) — Federal judges in D.C. on Friday partially blocked two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump targeting the Jenner and Block and WilmerHale law firms — temporarily halting Trump’s attempts to punish prominent law firms associated with his political foes.
In a lawsuit brought by Jenner and Block, D.C. District Judge John Bates described Trump’s executive order — which aims to strip the firms’ attorneys of any security clearances they may hold and severely restrict any business they may have before the federal government — as “troubling” and “disturbing.” He said it targets the firm’s and its employees’ First Amendment rights and rights to due process.
Bates, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, temporarily enjoined the administration from enforcing aspects of the order that seek to restrict government officials from engaging with officials from Jenner and Block, after he said the government failed to provide any substantive answers as to how employees from the firm threaten national security.
The judge said that attorneys representing Jenner and Block showed that they were likely being targeted on the basis of their protected free speech rights, and that they would suffer irreparable economic harm if it were fully implemented.
Later Friday, Judge Richard Leon also granted a temporary restraining order partially enjoining another executive order signed by Trump targeting the law firm WilmerHale.
Leon, also an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said several parts of Trump’s order clearly show “retaliatory actions based on perceived viewpoint” of employees of WilmerHale.
“There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm,” Leon said in his written order, following a hearing late Friday.
Leon is now the third federal judge to largely accept arguments from law firms targeted by Trump that his orders are likely unconstitutional — and that if implemented, Leon said, WilmerHale “faces crippling losses and its very survival is at stake.”
Both law firms filed suit in D.C. federal court on Friday to block the executive orders — the same day another major law firm struck a $100 million deal to preemptively avoid a similar Trump executive order.
The lawsuits accuse Trump of engaging in a sweeping campaign to intimidate major law firms who have represented plaintiffs currently suing the administration, or who have represented or at one point employed those he dislikes.
The Trump executive order threatened their futures as well as “the legal system itself,” Jenner and Block said in its lawsuit.
“These orders send a clear message to the legal profession: Cease certain representations adverse to the government and renounce the Administration’s critics — or suffer the consequences,” the Jenner and Block suit said. “The orders also attempt to pressure businesses and individuals to question or even abandon their associations with their chosen counsel, and to chill bringing legal challenges at all.”
The two firms are the latest firms seeking to counter what has been a rapid onslaught by the White House seeking to target individual firms that have hired or otherwise represented Trump’s political enemies.
Meanwhile, Trump said on Friday that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom struck a deal to avoid one of his executive orders by providing $100 million in pro bono work during the Trump administration — among other guarantees.
The move has sent shockwaves through the legal community. The White House is prepared to target more big law firms, sources tell ABC News, and there are ongoing discussions among top advisers on strategy associated with possibly entering into negotiations with more of them.
Legal scholars have said there is little legal precedent for Trump’s war on Big Law, which has created a chilling effect across the legal community, and most will certainly have a chilling effect on his opponents who will need legal representation against him.
The firms’ legal actions come on the heels of successful effort by the law firm Perkins Coie, which earlier this month secured a court order blocking similar executive action signed by Trump.
(TEXAS) — At least three people have died after heavy rain brought record-breaking flooding to South Texas, according to officials.
The deaths occurred in Hidalgo County, where officials issued a disaster declaration as a result of the flooding. The county, which includes the city of McAllen, saw some of the heaviest rain accumulations over the last 24 hours.
There was no further information about the three deaths immediately available, but officials said they would release more details later.
A large part of South Texas is still reeling from the life-threatening flooding that began overnight and continued into Friday morning.
Thunderstorms began Wednesday, with another round of heavy rainfall on Thursday afternoon and evening. The rain continued through Friday afternoon.
The National Weather Service issued flash flooding emergency warnings multiple times on Thursday and overnight for South McAllen and Harlingen — both located in the Rio Grande Valley in the southernmost parts of Texas.
“This is a particularly dangerous situation,” the NWS said in a statement issued Thursday night, urging people to avoid travel unless fleeing a region subject to flooding or are under an evacuation order.
The region received between 6 inches and a foot of rain or more in some areas, according to the NWS. McAllen got more than 6 inches of rain, while more than 14 inches was recorded at the Valley International Airport in Harlingen.
The NWS received reports for several vehicles stranded on Interstate 2 in waist-deep water, according to the agency. Dozens of water rescues took place as a result of the flash flooding.
Video shows first responders in inflatable boats rescuing people stranded on roadways. The South Texas Health System hospital in McAllen experienced minor flooding on its first floor.
Several school districts in the region canceled classes on Friday, as did the South Texas College in McAllen.
Flooding continued into Friday morning, with rivers nearly overflowing. A flood watch is in effect for parts of South Texas and southern Louisiana.
Water levels at the Arroyo Colorado River at Harlingen are nearing a record-breaking 30 feet. There is no precedent for the kind of damage a 30-foot water level in the Arroyo Colorado River could do, according to the NWS. The previous record water levels measured at the Arroyo Colorado River was 24 feet.
The flooding stemmed from a stationary boundary — a front between warm and cold air masses that moves very slowly or not at all. A band of significantly heavy storms was forming over the same hard-hit areas on Friday morning. A storm with 3-inch rain rates was forming over Harlingen on Friday morning.
The system also conjured up a tornado, with a twister reported near Edcouch, Texas, about 25 miles northeast of McAllen, that damaged several structures.
The potential for showers and thunderstorms in this region is expected to continue through the afternoon, with the threat ending Friday evening, forecasts show.
Former Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona joins supporters of the Department of Education workers during a clap-out event in front of the Department of Education building in Washington D..C., March 28, 2025. Via Arthur Jones II/ABC News.
(WASHINGTON) — Dozens of emotional Department of Education employees took part in a final “clap-out” in Washington, D.C., after losing jobs amid the Trump administration’s agency restructuring.
The administration slashed about 50% of the department’s workforce as part of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s strategy to abolish the department and send education decisions to the states.
The departing civil servants, who have either been terminated, retired or voluntarily bought out, have each been given about 30 minutes to retrieve their belongings this week — before exiting the building to clapping colleagues who were screaming “thank you!” outside the offices in Washington, D.C.
The last education chief, former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, visited his old office to celebrate employees affected by the workforce shakeup.
Clapping, shaking hands and cheering them along, Cardona told the civil servants, “Thank you for your service.”
“These public servants that are walking out right now deserve a thank you. They deserve respect. They’ve worked hard — not just during the time that I served as secretary but before that,” Cardona, wearing plain clothes, told reporters in a brief statement outside agency headquarters.
“I’m here, for the staff here, to say thank you,” he added.
DeNeen Ripley shook Cardona’s hand and told him her entire transportation division was eliminated. Ripley has worked at the department over 30 years and said she is taking an early retirement now.
“It feels like a death,” Ripley told ABC News. “It feels like a bad divorce of sorts, it just feels heartbreaking.”
Despite the massive overhaul and almost 2,000 employees lost, McMahon has stressed the Department of Education will continue to administer its statutory functions that students from disadvantaged backgrounds rely on, including grants, formula funding and loans.
“The president made clear today that none of the funding will stop for these [programs],” McMahon told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott after Trump’s executive order signing last week, which directed McMahon to use all necessary steps permitted under the law to abolish the agency she’s been tapped to lead.
“I think it is his hope that even more funding could go to the states. There will be more opportunity for it. And, you know, he means what he says. And so there’s not going to be any defunding or reduction in funding,” she added.
A dream job “snatched”
Washington, D.C., native Leondra Richardson and a crowd of emotional colleagues across the department left the near-defunct agency’s headquarters for the final time Friday.
“It was a dream job,” Richardson told ABC News. “And that dream was snatched from me by the new administration.”
Richardson said her entire office, the Office of the Chief Data Officer, was folded earlier this month by the “reduction in force” implemented on March 11.
Sydney Leiher, a midlevel career public servant, said she felt forced out and doesn’t know what’s next for her. After leaving with her belongings, including a beach volleyball and Trader Joe’s sack, Leiher stressed the reforms are not only unjustified but also unpopular.
“It’s definitely emotional,” Leiher said, holding back tears. “I feel bad for all of the people in the Chief Information Office who have to, like, gather all of our laptops and equipment — like, they don’t want to be doing this either.
“It’s just a really sad day. But seeing the support out here from all of other Department of ED staff and then also, like, other federal agencies and then the public just makes it shows to me that, like, people do not want this, and like, this is not popular, and this shouldn’t be happening,” Leiher added.
Richardson and Leiher both worked in the same division, the OCDO, that was shuttered. Without the office, Richardson said there will hardly be anyone left at the federal level to collect data to show student improvements or delays.
The Trump administration has claimed it is making cuts to rid the government of bureaucratic bloat, but Richardson told ABC News her IT job was not policy based or bureaucratic. Leiher, an analyst who worked on artificial intelligence machine learning, told ABC News that she took this job after returning from the Peace Corps. She added that civil service work shouldn’t be about politics.
“I believe in public service,” Leiher said. “I believe in a nonpartisan civil service. We’re important, we matter.”
Meanwhile, departing civil servants such as Dr. Jason Cottrell, a data coordinator in the Office of Postsecondary Education, the largest grant-making division in the department, said he believes students are being put in jeopardy as the Department of Education is diminished.
“Our nation’s students are going to suffer,” Cottrell said. “I think of the doctoral students that are, you know, trying to do research on cancer or, you know, learning or whatever it may be, and without the funds to support them, they are going to — it’s going to be hard for them to succeed without those funds, and we’re not going to gain that knowledge that we need.”
The farewell ceremony at the department comes as “clap-outs” are set to continue across the country next week at regional offices in places such as Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco. But these moments hit especially close to home for Richardson, who detailed how she overcame a teenage pregnancy while growing up east of the river in the Southeast quadrant of the city.
She said it’s so close yet so “far away” from the federal government.
“I hate that I can’t be a voice or inspiration to the young girls growing up in Southeast D.C. that I wanted to inspire,” Richardson said, adding that she “wanted to give a chance to, you know, show that there’s another way and you can make it forward.”
“You can make a big impact and a big difference in the country coming from where we from,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — A spring storm system will move east over the next three days, bringing a variety of dangerous and life-threatening weather, including tornados and large hail, from the Heartland to the East Coast.
From late Saturday evening into Saturday night, severe storms will take shape from Oklahoma City to Kansas City, according to the forecast. The biggest threat with these storms will be damaging winds and large hail, but a tornado cannot be ruled out.
On Sunday, the storm will move into the Midwest and the South with severe weather expected from near Dallas all the way to Erie, Pennsylvania. The highest threat for strong tornadoes will be from east of Little Rock, Arkansas, to Tupelo, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; Nashville, Tennessee; and Evansville, Indiana.
Damaging winds and hail are also possible in Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Cleveland.
On Monday, the severe weather moves to the East Coast and I-95 corridor from Upstate New York all the way south to Tallahassee, and New Orleans. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat for northern cities but a few tornadoes cannot be ruled out across the southern areas.
On the north side of this storm, snow and ice is forecast from Dakotas all the way to New England Saturday into Sunday.
Ice storm warnings have been issued for Wisconsin and Michigan, where up to a half an inch of icy glaze will cover streets, roads, trees and sidewalks.
Additionally, periods of rain and thunderstorms will move into the Carolinas and Asheville Saturday night into Sunday morning. The area has experienced wildfires over the last week due to the dry conditions.
On Saturday, seven states from New York to North Carolina are under Elevated Fire Danger.
The thunderstorms with heavy rain will be on and off into Monday.
Rumeysa Ozturk is shown in this undated photo. Obtained by ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge in Boston ruled that Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk cannot be deported until she decides whether she has jurisdiction to rule if Ozturk was lawfully taken into custody.
Judge Denise Casper said Friday that Ozturk “shall not be removed from the United States until further Order of this Court.”
The government revoked Ozturk’s visa due to her pro-Palestinian activism, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who added the State Department may have revoked more than 300 student visas since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
“It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” Rubio said during a press conference in Guyana on Thursday.
Ozturk, a Turkish national, was arrested by immigration authorities as she was headed to meet her friends and break her fast during Ramadan on Tuesday.
She is listed in the ICE database as “in custody” and appears to be held at an ICE processing center in Louisiana.
Rubio plainly said Ozturk’s visa was revoked by the government.
“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus — we’re not going to give you a visa,” he said.
“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. And once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it’s just that simple,” Rubio said.
Last year, Ozturk was the co-author of an opinion piece in the Tufts Daily newspaper, demanding the university administration “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and disclose and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.
She made no mention of Hamas in the op-ed, though a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
“She’s softspoken, she doesn’t want to hurt you when she’s talking,” her friend, Reyyan Bilge, an assistant teaching professor in Northeastern University’s psychology department, told ABC News. “She makes sure that she doesn’t offend anyone, let alone possibly incite violence. I’ve never heard her swearing, believe me, this is the kind of person we’re talking about.”
The secretary said it was “crazy” and “stupid” for any country to issue visas to any individual who intends to be disruptive on college campuses.
“If you invite me into your home because you say, I want to come to your house for dinner and I go to your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re going to kick me out,” he said. “Well, we’re going to do the same thing if you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us.”
“We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not going to do it in our country,” he said.
The mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts, where Ozturk was approached and detained, said it appears the Tufts doctoral student was detained over the exercise of free speech.
“I am deeply concerned to see a student with legal status detained for what appears to be the exercise of free speech. Rumeysa Ozturk has a First Amendment right to free speech and a right to due process and that must be upheld, just as all immigration detainees have rights that must be respected without exception,” Mayor Katjana Ballantyne said in a statement.
“Our rights are being threatened in a variety of ways right now and Somerville will make use of the law and our voices to defend them. My administration recently filed a joint lawsuit with Chelsea against federal officials to do just that. We cannot sit by idly,” the mayor said.
