In an American Association of University Professors lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the administration’s deportation policy, Peter Hatch, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency official, testified that ICE used Canary Mission for leads in its investigation of noncitizen pro-Palestine student activists.
On Wednesday, Hatch confirmed that a dossier on Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk included her Canary Mission profile, as well as the op-ed she co-wrote in the Daily in March 2024.
Hatch testified that ICE had created a team that compiled over 100 reports of students who had engaged in pro-Palestine activism. He added that ICE used Canary Mission to gather the names and subsequently conduct background reports on them before conducting their arrests.
The American Association of University Professors sued the federal government on March 25 over its arrests and planned deportations of noncitizen students who had engaged in pro-Palestine activism in 2023 and 2024. The association argues that the administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” violates the First and Fifth Amendments.
The lawsuit was initially made following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student detained on March 8.
Canary Mission contains thousands of profiles of students, professors and other individuals whom they accuse of promoting “hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.”
Öztürk’s profile on the website contains links to the op-ed, courses she teaches at Tufts and her LinkedIn profile, which stated in February that she lived in the Greater Boston area. Öztürk was arrested on March 25 by masked ICE agents near her home in Somerville. She was kept in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana for 45 days and released on bail on May 9.
