Four Homeland Security Agents Testified About Who's Ordering Them to Arrest Grad Students

Up in federal court here, there's an interesting proceeding going on. At issue are the controversial arrests and detention of Palestinian student activists for no apparent reason except for their writings and their actions at various protests. These include the two high-profile detentions of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and that of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student whose obviously meritless arrest became a sensation when a video of it swamped social media. These two, and several other detainees, are suing the government for running what they call an "ideological deportation policy" in violation of their First Amendment rights. On Tuesday, four veteran Homeland Security agents testified that things have gotten seriously hinky at work since the White House changed hands in January. From Politico:

“Somebody at a higher level than the people I was speaking to had an interest in him,” said agent Darren McCormack, who oversaw the arrest of recent Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in March... Each of the arrests discussed Tuesday took place based on determinations by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the presence of the foreign academics in the U.S. undermined U.S. foreign policy interests. They included Khalil, Öztürk, Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri and Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi. Subsequent to their arrests, all four were ordered released from custody by federal judges who found Rubio’s orders appeared to have violated their constitutional rights.

Oh, little Marco. You're one step away from the infinitesimal.

The agents said they couldn’t recall similar requests in the past and that, prior to President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, their division — Homeland Security Investigations — rarely took part in immigration enforcement. “It was not something that I had much experience with, if any,” said Cunningham, an assistant special agent in charge in Boston. “Most of my career as an agent and as a supervisor has been in enforcement of drug laws, drug smuggling, money laundering. … That’s changed recently.”

Particularly interesting was the testimony of agent Brian Cunningham, who supervised the arrest of Öztürk. Reading between the lines, it seems that Cunningham was more than a little baffled by the orders he was carrying out.

“We had a meeting shortly after the inauguration, several meetings actually, that impressed upon us that Title 8 [immigration enforcement] was going to be prioritized,” Cunningham said, adding that deportations are typically handled by another Department of Homeland Security component, Enforcement and Removal Operations.

Cunningham said the request he received regarding Öztürk was so unusual that he contacted a Homeland Security lawyer to confirm its legality.

“I can’t recall a time that it’s come top-down like this with a visa revocation, under my purview anyway,” he said. “I did contact our legal counsel to make sure that we’re on solid legal ground….The operation kind of developed pretty quickly.” Cunningham said that the background information he received on Öztürk included an op-ed she co-wrote in the Tufts student newspaper last year supporting divestment from Israel. The agent said he skimmed the op-ed and didn’t see anything obviously criminal in it. “I didn’t see anything in the op-ed that suggested she’d committed a crime,” Cunningham said.

Maybe it's the grunts on the ground who can monkey-wrench the cruel machine of deportation. Somebody has to do it, God knows.