Federal immigration authorities arrested a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey on Tuesday night, the latest in a string of arrests targeting international students for their Palestinian advocacy.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student in the graduate school of arts and sciences at the Massachusetts university, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers outside her off-campus apartment on her way to an Iftar dinner with friends, according to her attorney and activists.

In an email to the Tufts community, university president Sunil Kumar said the school was told that federal authorities terminated her visa status, “and we seek to confirm whether that information is true.”

The Independent has requested comment from ICE.

Ozturk, who is in the United States on a non-immigrant F-1 visa for international students, was meeting with friends to break her Ramadan fast when she was detained near her home in Somerville, attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said in a statement to The Independent.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” she said.

Surveillance footage of the arrest shows plainclothes agents approaching her from the street. One officer, whose head is covered by sweatshirt hood, appears to approach her without identifying himself and then grabs her arm. Another officer approaches and takes her phone while she is placed in handcuffs. Three officers cover their faces with neck gaiters.

Tufts did not have any prior knowledge of the arrest “and did not share any information with federal authorities prior to the event,” Kumar wrote.

Kumar issued a reminder that the university has a protocol for how to respond to federal agents making “unannounced visits” on or off campus.

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Ozturk’s attorney has filed a petition of habeas corpus challenging her arrest and detention. Massachusetts District Judge Indira Talwani is giving federal officials until Friday to respond to the complaint, and Ozturk cannot be moved outside the state without at least 48 hours of advance notice to the court, according to Talwani’s order.

Ozturk is a student at the university’s doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development, and graduated with a master’s degree from the Teachers College at Columbia University, according to her LinkedIn.

“I am passionate about researching children’s and adolescents’ digital media and technologies for caring, kind, and compassionate media environments,” she writes. “As an interdisciplinary media researcher and developmental scientist in training, I research children’s and adolescents’ positive development in a media-embedded, globalized, and connected world.”

Last year, in response to Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily newspaper calling on Kumar to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and for the university to divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.

Ozturk is among dozens of students and professors identified by Canary Mission, a pro-Israel campaign that maintains a database intended to blacklist and intimidate activists the group accuses of promoting “hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.”

“Efforts to deport students based on their speech or protected activism undermine America’s commitment to free expression,” Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Independent. “If ICE detained Ozturk based on her op-ed or activism, it’s a worrying escalation in an already fraught environment for college students here on student visas.”

Her arrest follows similar actions from federal authorities targeting student activists and students who have merely spoken in support of Palestine, none of whom have been accused of committing any crime. Donald Trump’s administration has zeroed in on campus activism at prestigious universities, where Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked a wave of demonstrations and protest encampments demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel’s devastation.

Students have been accused of supporting terrorism and violating the president’s executive orders directing federal agencies investigate and potentially remove non-citizens who “bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles” and “advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

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On Tuesday, university professors and academic organizations from across the country filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of violating the First Amendment through a “climate of fear and repression” on college campuses.

“Out of fear that they might be arrested and deported for lawful expression and association, some noncitizen students and faculty have stopped attending public protests or resigned from campus groups that engage in political advocacy,” according to the lawsuit.

“Others have declined opportunities to publish commentary and scholarship, stopped contributing to classroom discussions, or deleted past work from online databases and websites,” attorneys wrote. “Many now hesitate to address political issues on social media, or even in private texts. The [policy], in other words, is accomplishing its purpose: it is terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavor.”

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Manhattan blocked the Trump administration from deporting Yunseo Chung, a Columbia University student and lawful permanent resident who was the victim of the government’s “shocking overreach,” vilifying her political views and constitutionally protected right to protest, according to her attorneys.

Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and prominent student activist accused of organizing “pro-Hamas” attacks on campus, is currently battling his removal from the United States after his shocking arrest in front of his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, earlier this month. He is currently detained in Louisiana as his case moves jurisdictions to a federal court in New Jersey.

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Signs that investors in the US bond market are baking in higher inflation would be a “major red flag” that could upend policymakers’ plans to cut interest rates, a top Federal Reserve official warned.

The remarks from Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed and a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, come just over a week after a closely watched University of Michigan poll showed households’ long-term inflation projections hit the highest level since 1993.

“If you start seeing market-based long-run inflation expectations start behaving the way these surveys have done in the last two months, I would view that as a major red flag area of concern,” Goolsbee told the Financial Times.

The Fed last week nudged up its inflation outlook and slashed its growth forecast, as Donald Trump’s tariffs cascade across the world’s largest economy. Still, the central bank’s chair Jay Powell expressed confidence that inflation expectations remain in check, citing a subdued outlook in markets.

The five-year, five-year rate — a measure of markets’ assessment of price growth over the second half of the next decade — is 2.2 per cent. In contrast, consumers in the UMich poll forecast inflation of 3.9 per cent over the long term.

Goolsbee, who served as a top economic adviser to then-president Barack Obama, said that if investor expectations begin to converge with those of American households, the Fed would need to act: “Almost regardless of the circumstances, you must address that,” he said.

Central bankers everywhere view keeping longer-term inflation expectations “anchored” as a crucial part of their job. If the public no longer trusts them, a vicious circle of higher wages and price increases could ensue.

Keeping expectations under control now matters even more than usual, with the Fed struggling to bring inflation back in line with its 2 per cent inflation goal after the US economy suffered the biggest rise in prices since the 1980s, an increase fuelled by pandemic-era supply constraints.

Alberto Musalem, president of the St Louis Fed and another FOMC voter, told journalists on Wednesday: “I am very attuned to the fact that businesses and households only a few years ago went through an episode of high inflation and are likely to be more sensitive to that should inflation rise again for whatever reason.”

Musalem also echoed Goolsbee’s concerns over consumers’ concerns over higher prices seeping into other measures, saying in a speech earlier in the day that the Fed would need to maintain — or even consider tightening — monetary policy should medium- to longer-term expectations “begin to increase actual inflation or its persistence”.

The personal consumption expenditures price index, one of the Fed’s preferred measures, was 2.5 per cent in January.

Goolsbee said the central bank was no longer on the “golden path”, witnessed in 2023 and 2024, when inflation was seemingly falling back to 2 per cent, without derailing growth or raising unemployment. It had now entered “a different chapter”, where “there’s a lot of dust in the air”.

The Fed has acknowledged Trump-induced uncertainty over the outlook for inflation and growth have waylaid its plans to cut interest rates from the current “restrictive” level of 4.25 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

Though officials still expect to make two quarter-point cuts at some point this year, the central bank held borrowing costs for the second meeting in a row last week.

Powell acknowledged that, partly in response to tariffs, “there may be a delay in further progress over the course of this year” on inflation.

Goolsbee said he believed borrowing costs would be “a fair bit lower” in 12-18 months from now, but cautioned it may take longer than anticipated for the next cut to come because of economic uncertainty.

“My view is that when there’s dust in the air, ‘wait and see’ is the correct approach when you face uncertainty,” he said. “But ‘wait and see’ is not free — it comes with a cost. You gain the ability to learn new information, [but] you lose some of the capacity to move gradually.”

Goolsbee, who serves a district that covers Michigan, home to many of the major US carmakers, said the next three to six weeks would be “a critical period [when] we’re going to resolve a series of policy uncertainties”.

“When I’m out talking to executives here in the district, they are frequently citing April 2nd as a key point of their uncertainty,” Goolsbee said, referring to Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day”, when the president plans to unveil “reciprocal” tariffs on US trade partners.

“They don’t know what’s going to happen with tariffs, they don’t know how big they’re going to be, they don’t know whether there will be exemptions, how they would apply to the auto sector, especially, because of its integration with Canada and Mexico.”