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This Group Has a ‘Deportation List.’ Is the Government Reading It?
CNN One Thing
Apr 2, 2025
As federal agents detain a growing number of international college students, some are wondering: where are they getting these names? We hear about pro-Israel groups working to reveal details about student activists and how it could chill free speech.
Guests: Gloria Pazmino, CNN Correspondent
Have a tip or question about the new Trump administration? Call us at 202-240-2895.
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:05
At first, all you see in the video is a quiet street. Some apartment buildings, a few cars parked along the sidewalk, could be any city in America. A few guys wearing nondescript sweatshirts approach a woman walking on the sidewalk.
Rumeysa Ozturk
00:00:22
No, no, no!
David Rind
00:00:24
She's startled. They pry her phone from her hands and prepare to put her in handcuffs.
David Rind
00:00:34
A few more people enter the frame and encircle the woman. Some take out badges from underneath their shirts. They all pull up dark masks to cover their noses and mouths.
Agents
00:00:45
We're the police
Man
00:00:47
Eah, you don't look like it. Why are you hiding your face?
David Rind
00:00:50
As they put the woman in handcuffs and walk her to a waiting car, you can hear someone out of view shouting.
Agents
00:00:56
How do I know you are the police?
David Rind
00:00:58
But the agents say nothing back. As the car drives off, the street is once again quiet. The entire process takes about a minute. By now, you may have seen this surveillance video online or in your social feeds. The woman at the center of it is Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who was studying at Tufts University in the Boston area at the time of her arrest.
Kate Bouldan
00:01:34
'But the school now says they were told her visa status has been terminated. DHS says she, quote, engaged in activities in support of Hamas, and her attorney calls those claims wild accusations. Last year, she co-authored an op-ed in the school's newspaper, criticizing Tuft's response to the pro-Palestinian movement.
David Rind
00:01:57
She's just one of about a dozen international students who have been detained across the country as part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. Columbia, the University of Alabama, Georgetown, the university of Minnesota, they've all seen students targeted.
Kate Bouldan
00:02:12
The latest warning and threat coming from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
00:02:17
Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.
Reporter
00:02:19
You're saying it could be more than 300.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
00:02:21
I mean at some point I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them, but we're looking every day
David Rind
00:02:28
'And some of these students, including Ozturk, have been flown to holding facilities hundreds of miles away from where they were apprehended. It's left many students feeling afraid to post on social media, afraid to go outside, because there's no telling if they could be next on the list. Question is, where is that list coming from? Today, CNN's Gloria Pazmino tells us about a pro-Israel group making such a list and the questions that remain about how they're using it. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:03:08
So Gloria, there have been a ton of questions as we see student after student arrested or had their visas revoked. And a big one I have is how is the government identifying which students to go after here?
Gloria Pazmino
00:03:20
Yeah, so I think that when the story started, right, when we started to see the first instances of students being arrested, that was certainly one of the biggest questions. How are they targeting who to go after? And frankly, I think, that question is still pretty much unanswered. If we ask the State Department or the White House, they would say that they are going after individuals. who have been involved in these alleged criminal activities. In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, they've mentioned his supposed support for a terrorist organization, which we've yet to see any evidence of. But as I've been reporting out the story and really sort of digging into each specific case, I started to notice a trend line among all the cases. And that was this complaint that there were these independent organizations out there who for several months now have been working to identify students. And I found it really interesting that almost every student that's been targeted so far hold a court of law, I've been the subject of a harassment campaign in their words, and targeted by these groups that are looking to identify student protesters. So I started to ask myself the question, is that how they're getting the information? And like I said, I think because the government is not being entirely transparent here so far about how they are getting that information, it still remains a bit unknown.
David Rind
00:05:01
So these outside groups that these students are claiming were part of this, like who are they and what kind of methods do they use?
Gloria Pazmino
00:05:10
'So there's two big ones that you can find sort of mentioned over and over in many of these legal filings. One of them is called Betar. The other one is called Canary Mission. And I spent some time talking with the former executive director of Betar, the New York chapter. And Betar is a self-identified Zionist group that's been in operation for many, many years.
David Rind
00:05:35
'Very pro-Israel.
Gloria Pazmino
00:05:37
'Very pro-Israel, and this guy that I worked to talk to, his name is Ross Glick, and he was mentioned in some of these legal filings. So I started to kind of ask myself the question, and then I, you know, I finally picked up the phone and said, well, maybe he'll just talk to me. And he did.
Gloria Pazmino
00:05:57
Thank you for making the time. I really appreciate it.
Gloria Pazmino
00:06:01
You know, and he said that, after October 7th... He started seeing the campus protests and started seeing the way that people were, in his words, going out to express support for what happened in Israel. That's certainly his view of the conflict.
Ross Glick
00:06:17
You know, the night of October 7th, I was meandering around Manhattan and I just couldn't believe thousands and thousands of people celebrating October 7. It just threw me, you know, it was a complete trigger for me. I grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors. My mother was born in a DP camp in Germany.
Gloria Pazmino
00:06:35
And so he began this effort to help identify some of the people who were participating in these protests.
Ross Glick
00:06:42
I didn't really have a plan at first, I was just going out documenting.
Gloria Pazmino
00:06:46
And he told me that it all began sort of in this disjointed fashion, that he was getting information from students, from faculty, from concerned residents who were saying to him, hey, this person was at this protest.
Ross Glick
00:07:02
So we started to organize. We started to build grassroots groups that were connected throughout the world. First to document and capture this information, build databases that we could easily query and start to organize what we're seeing because we were starting to see a lot of repetitive faces, similar narratives.
Gloria Pazmino
00:07:22
You know, Ross Glick has a background in marketing and technology. And he talked about how he started essentially just combing through hours and hours of video, combing, through people's social media.
Ross Glick
00:07:34
The process really is first identifying. So we have.
Gloria Pazmino
00:07:37
matching that up with photos.
Ross Glick
00:07:39
Then we do a relational search to understand their communication footprint.
Gloria Pazmino
00:07:44
using artificial intelligence to help identify people, using facial recognition technology.
Ross Glick
00:07:51
The ones that are unmasked, those are pretty easy. It's the mask, sunglasses, surgical mask. Those are the ones that are a little bit more difficult.
Gloria Pazmino
00:07:59
Some technology that's still very new, right, and sort of untested, these were all the methods that the organization relied on to help identify some of the students.
David Rind
00:08:15
It sounds not totally uncommon from what reporters do, even in some cases, just combing through what is out there to find out information. But does this go further than that?
Gloria Pazmino
00:08:26
So I think that's at the core of the issue, right? Because you are right. Many times I have looked at an image or I have look at video and try to identify someone so that I can find them or go talk to them. But the issue here is what is being done with that information. Is the information being used by the government to target people over something? that here in the United States is protected by the constitution, right? The right to free speech, the right to organize, the right to protest.
Gloria Pazmino
00:09:00
And then what happens once someone, you sort of, you know, confirm, or you decide you have enough information, what do you do with that information?
Ross Glick
00:09:09
We hand it off. So I have different contacts depending on who I'm working with.
Gloria Pazmino
00:09:12
So when I spoke to Ross, I asked him point blank, I said, Khalil's attorneys are alleging that you helped craft this deportation list and that he was in this deportations list and that you shared it with the government, is that true? And he said, yeah, I have my contacts.
Ross Glick
00:09:30
So I have different relationships, you know, and again, depending on who's available, what their priorities are, whether they have the capacity to process, to help move this along the chain.
Gloria Pazmino
00:09:38
And he wouldn't name names, and if you kind of go through his social media footprint, the way that he's been doing to other people, you can see that Ross is a very active person. He's in the halls of Congress meeting with lawmakers. He's advocating for this issue and this cause that is clearly very important to him, that he's very passionate about.
Ross Glick
00:10:00
And that's what I did, and I was very proud.
Gloria Pazmino
00:10:02
Are you still kind of associated with them right now, or?
Ross Glick
00:10:07
As a volunteer, as a, you know, as it is Bear for life. But, but operationally, I'm not the executive director. I wanted to pursue some initiatives that were a little outside of the 501 three C parameters. I'm more DC advocate.
Gloria Pazmino
00:10:20
It does beg the question, well, is he passing along a list? Is Betar passing along the list? And they, the organization itself, has said that they submitted a list to DHS and ICE officials.
David Rind
00:10:33
Wow. Well, what does the government say about that? Do they acknowledge that that's happened?
Gloria Pazmino
00:10:37
The State Department told us that it uses all available technology when it comes to visa screening and vetting. They declined to say specifically whether or not they are using any sort of intelligence gathered by outside actors. The White House press secretary did say that the Department of Homeland Security was using quote unquote intelligence to help identify international student protesters. And then we went to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. agency, also known as ICE, who told us that they are not working with or have received any tips through the ICE tip line from groups identified as Betar or Canary Mission. So you'll notice in that statement, it's only about those two groups, and it certainly leaves open the question of whether or not they're gathering information from any other that we simply just don't know about yet.
David Rind
00:11:30
Right, because we've seen law enforcement use this kind of technology to identify criminals. I'm thinking about the investigation into January 6 rioters at the Capitol. But can you use it to pick people out of a protest crowd that is protesting peacefully? Like is that legal?
Gloria Pazmino
00:11:46
So that was one of the questions that, you know, in reporting out the story, I wanted to pose to the legal experts and to the privacy experts. They all kept coming back to the same thing. The problem is not so much that John Smith is being identified as John Smith, who was at the protest. The problem, is what is that information being used for? And if it's too... prosecute John Smith for whatever he said at the protest, then that is where we start to get into a problem of this kind of action being an encroachment on people's First Amendment rights. And so that's why it raises the question of, if the government is relying on an outside entity to do that, what does that really mean? And can they do that?
David Rind
00:12:44
'Even if a protester doesn't necessarily end up on this so-called deportation list, you still have these pro-Israel groups that are providing information, blasting names out to followers on social media. Like what is the fallout for someone who just has to go about living their life?
Gloria Pazmino
00:13:02
Yeah, I think the worst thing that's happening for some students is that they're being targeted for deportation proceedings. For others that I've spoken to, including this woman, Sara Rasikh, who is a student at the University of Toronto, who joined the protests on her campus last year, for her, constant hate messages sent out to her on her social media. She told me that it's made her professional life difficult because when you Google her, One of the first things that comes up is her Canary Mission profile. I spent a lot of time on the Canary mission website and what they have done is they've created a page that's called profiles and they break them down by students, academics, health professionals and it looks exactly like what I'm describing, you know, a profile page complete with photos, names, university association. And when you click on a profile, what it does is that it has aggregated all of the person's social media activity, even their media appearances. For example, in the case of Sara...
Anchor
00:14:14
I know it's busy, but it's good to have you with us.
Sara Rasikh
00:14:16
Thank you so much for having me.
Anchor
00:14:17
All right, the message you guys are trying to send here.
Sara Rasikh
00:14:19
Yeah, I'd love to tell you about it.
Gloria Pazmino
00:14:21
She did an interview with Canadian news station during the protests and that's in there as evidence of what they say is her support for Hamas organization, which she very clearly denied to us.
Sara Rasikh
00:14:35
we do believe that the university still has the room to do the right thing, like I mentioned. They can still be leaders in divesting from Israeli apartheid, they can still do that. But at the end of the day, this is our campus and we will take up space if they ignore our calls, which they have been doing for six plus months now.
Gloria Pazmino
00:14:53
So she's talked about how it's created professional difficulty. She says that she sometimes fears for her safety because she'll be targeted because of her views. So while she is not in the United States, so she's not being targeted for deportation, she did say that she has experienced several other consequences as a result of having a profile on this page where she is portrayed as this person who supports a terror organization.
David Rind
00:15:20
'So more broadly on this campus crackdown, we're seeing student visas revoked, seemingly left and right. I guess if you're an international student or just any student wanting to protest, how are they going about their day-to-day lives now with all this hanging over their head?
Gloria Pazmino
00:15:36
So I think one thing that's been a constant as I talk to students, legal experts, the attorneys who are representing some of the students, I think the constant is that the feeling is that this is all meant to scare people out of protesting.
Erin Burnett
00:15:57
'The Trump administration demanding the deportation of yet another university student involved in pro-Palestinian protests. Lawyer for Cornell University grad student Momodou Tal says ICE is now demanding he surrender to be deported.
Gloria Pazmino
00:16:12
'One of the cases that's gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks is the case of Mamadou Taal. And he was also, like Mahmoud Khalil, a very prominent pro-Palestine activist on the campus of Cornell University. The university had taken some disciplinary action against him. He had been through a few rounds of disciplinary proceedings with the university. His visa had been at risk in the past.
Erin Burnett
00:16:37
He said he saw this coming a couple months ago. He told our reporter, Elle Reeve, that he's living in fear because of his views.
Gloria Pazmino
00:16:44
Then following Khalil's arrest, he preemptively sued the Trump administration to try and prevent his deportation. He believed that he was going to be targeted.
David Rind
00:16:53
Oh, he saw it coming.
Gloria Pazmino
00:16:54
Correct. He figured he was gonna be targeted, he tried to preempt it. And a judge in New York denied that request. So it was supposed to play out in court, but just a day ago we learned that he actually made the decision to leave the country. And he said part of the reason for that decision was that he did not feel two things, A, that he could walk freely without the fear that he would be picked up by immigration agents, but B, that did not think he would prevail in the courts. So again, when you take that to immigration advocates, to First Amendment advocates, they say that when we talk about the chilling of free speech, that's what that looks like, you know, people making decisions about their lives and what they're going to say. based on a fear that they will be persecuted for an opinion that they express.
David Rind
00:17:48
And in some cases, leaving the country altogether, which is what the Trump administration wants.
Gloria Pazmino
00:17:54
Correct.
David Rind
00:17:54
Well, so are these schools pushing back on the Trump Administration at all?
Gloria Pazmino
00:17:58
That's a great question and I think that the universities are in a really difficult place. There's a sort of two parts to this story. One is the way in which international students are being affected. The other is the very clear attack that the Trump administration is deploying on many of these universities, right? We saw it with Columbia University several weeks ago. The Trump administration said they would cut their funding. Columbia turned around, changed many of its rules. its interim president ended up resigning. So the universities are kind of stuck in this difficult position of having to respond to the demands of the Trump administration because their funding and their money's on the line, while also trying to protect their international student community. In fact, in the past few weeks, we've seen many schools send out guidance to their student body to remind people. if you're an international visa holder, carry your documents around with you, perhaps avoid traveling right now if you can help it, connecting people to the available resources that each school has, acknowledging that this is something that they're concerned about right now.
David Rind
00:19:11
I mean, that's wild. You have whole swaths of these student bodies afraid that they might be picked off the street in broad daylight. It's just a really tense time, I imagine.
Gloria Pazmino
00:19:22
Completely. And so, absolutely there is a climate of fear and concern among the academic community, the international student community, and I would say just students in general, right, that there's this feeling that activity on campus is being policed.
David Rind
00:19:41
Gloria, thank you.
Gloria Pazmino
00:19:43
Thank you.
David Rind
00:19:50
One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundidge. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.
