JTA — For the last year and a half, Tufts Students for Israel has battled against criticism of Israel on the Boston-area campus. But on Thursday, the group took a stance of a different kind: It published an op-ed in the campus newspaper advocating for the school’s most prominent pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel student.

“The detainment of Rümeysa Öztürk is plain wrong,” the group said. “And we stand firmly against it.”

They were referring to the Turkish national and fifth-year doctoral student who was seized by ICE officers on March 27 after leaving her home to attend a Ramadan iftar dinner. The group said it was “horrified” by the video of Öztürk’s arrest, in which several plainclothes officers surround her on the street before bundling her into an unmarked car. The group was also unsettled by the fact that her only apparent offense was having co-authored an op-ed calling on Tufts to divest from Israel and accusing Israel of genocide.

“If any of us do not have the right to speak freely, then none of us have freedom of speech,” Tufts Students for Israel wrote.

The students joined a number of other Jewish voices condemning Öztürk’s arrest. More than 100 rabbis across Massachusetts have signed a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s action, and dozens of members of a local synagogue attended a rally in her name.

Their advocacy comes amid an apparent hardening of American Jewish sentiment against the Trump administration’s crackdown on what it says are “Hamas sympathizers” on college campuses. In recent days, the CEOs of Hillel International and the Anti-Defamation League both articulated reservations about deporting non-citizen students who participated in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests; for the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, that marked a shift from several weeks ago.

Yet at the same time, the act of rejecting the Trump administration’s ostensible support has not come close to resolving the alienation that many Jews have felt during the Israel-Hamas war. Instead, both students and locals say they were turned off by the anti-Israel tenor of demonstrations on Öztürk’s behalf.

“I think that the vast majority of the Jewish community thinks that it’s really quite bad that this happened,” said Eitan Hersh, a Jewish Tufts professor who has studied Jewish campus life and attitudes after October 7, 2023. Yet, he added, “some of the students who came to my office were disappointed that there was no way for them to express their support for this student.”

Öztürk’s arrest added her to a growing list of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel students targeted by the Trump administration for deportation. The spree began when ICE officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader, at his home in university housing last month.

As with Khalil, ICE moved Öztürk to Louisiana in an apparent bid to avoid intervention by judges in more liberal jurisdictions. In court Thursday, the government argued that because Öztürk had been moved, a federal judge in Boston no longer had jurisdiction over the case and that it should proceed in immigration court.

The State Department, which revoked Öztürk’s visa at the same time as she was arrested, claimed she had been engaged in activities supporting Hamas. Canary Mission, an anonymous pro-Israel watchdog group that compiles dossiers on........

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