A group of Democrat lawmakers visited two anti-Israel activists held in Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities this week, claiming they are “unlawfully held in harrowing conditions” after having been taken into custody and having their student visas revoked.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) were pictured outside one of the facilities on Tuesday, with Pressley reporting that they were there to visit Mahmoud Khalil and her “constituent,” Rumeysa Ozturk:
Neither Khalil nor Ozturk are American citizens and are thus prohibited from voting in elections and unable to be correctly labeled as “constituents.”
The BBC reported that Rep. Troy Carter (D-LA) and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) also joined the Massachusetts lawmakers to visit the pair.
“To Rümeysa, Mahmoud, and everyone who has been harmed by this lawless White House: we see you and we won’t stop fighting for you,” Pressley wrote on social media, adding that both former college students “are being unlawfully held in harrowing conditions.”
“To Donald Trump: your abuses of power and attacks on our constitutional rights will NOT go unchecked,” the “Squad” member added.
Khalil, a 30-year-old former graduate student of Columbia University who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents, was arrested by ICE officials in March after leading radical protests on the New York institution’s campus, Breitbart News reported.
According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” as an activist at Columbia:
In defense of his arrest and subsequent transport to a Louisiana ICE facility, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan said, “You can’t go and call for the annihilation of Israel and take over a college campus and take over a college building and destroy government property. You can’t hand out literature supporting a terrorist organization.”
“They may have gotten away with that in the Biden administration,” Homan explained in a March Fox News appearance. “They’re not going to get away with it under the Trump administration. When you come to this country, either on a visa or you become a resident alien, that’s a privilege. But with that privilege comes certain rules. You can’t violate law.”
Last week, Khalil compared his time in the ICE detention center to a Nazi concentration camp in an op-ed published by the Washington Post.
Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, also engaged in anti-Israel activism while at Massachusetts’ Tufts University, co-authoring an op-ed in a school publication calling on the institution to take part in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for “companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.”
The Turkish anti-Israel activist was also arrested by ICE officials in March.
Speaking with reporters, Markey claimed that the White House sent the former students to facilities in a Republican-controlled state in an effort to “circumscribe [their] constitutional rights.”
The latest Democrat field trip comes just days after Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) led the charge to El Salvador to meet with accused MS-13 gang member and alleged wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was soon followed by four more fellow Democrats: Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), Maxine Dexter (D-OR), Maxwell Frost (D-FL), and Robert Garcia (D-CA).
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
Source:Breitbart News Rephrased By: InfoArmed