Federal officials said they had arrested a visiting professor at Harvard on Wednesday, weeks after he fired a pellet gun near a synagogue and officials accused him of antisemitism.
The professor, Carlos Portugal Gouvea, who lived near the synagogue, said he was hunting rats nearby, and local police and leaders of the synagogue have said they did not believe antisemitism played a role in the event. He faced several charges but none related to bias.
But federal officials, who revoked the professor’s visa last month, have continued to assert a belief that the attack was antisemitic.
“There is no room in the United States for brazen, violent acts of antisemitism like this,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a news release on Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security said in the release that after he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Boston, the visiting professor, who is a law professor in Brazil, had voluntarily agreed to leave the United States rather than be deported.
“It is a privilege to work and study in the United States, not a right,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “We are under zero obligation to admit foreigners who commit these inexplicably reprehensible acts or to let them stay here.”
The arrest comes as the Trump administration has targeted American universities and threatened to withhold funding from college campuses it says have not done enough to combat antisemitism.
The incident that led to Mr. Gouvea’s arrest occurred in early October during a Yom Kippur service at the Temple Beth Zion, a synagogue a few of miles south of Harvard in Brookline, Mass.
When private security guards at the synagogue heard a loud noise outside, the building went into lockdown.
A guard then spotted Mr. Gouvea behind a tree with a pellet gun. When a guard attempted to arrest him, Mr. Gouvea engaged in a brief physical struggle and fled, according to a police report.
Mr. Gouvea was later arrested without incident by Brookline police at his residence and charged with illegally discharging a pellet gun, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and damage to personal property.
Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump official who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, responded to the episode on social media.
“Do NOT mess with houses of worship or people of faith in our country,” she wrote shortly after the incident, adding that she was “on it.”
But local police officials said that they did not believe antisemitism played a role in the incident, and therefore did not submit any bias-based charges.
Leaders for the synagogue agreed, telling The New York Times in October that “it is potentially dangerous to use a BB gun in such a populated spot, but it does not appear to have been fueled by antisemitism.”
Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, of Harvard Chabad, also said in a speech on campus in October that the incident was not motivated by antisemitism.
“This man is married to a Jewish woman and has Jewish children, and it’s absolutely nothing to do with targeting the Jewish community,” he said of Professor Gouvea, according to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
In November, Mr. Gouvea accepted a plea deal on the charge of illegally discharging the pellet gun, but the other three charges were dismissed, according to court documents.
Lawyers for Mr. Gouvea did not immediately offer a comment on the case on Friday morning. A request for comment sent to Mr. Gouvea’s assistant at Harvard was not immediately returned on Friday morning.
Harvard University, which had placed Mr. Gouvea on leave as it investigated the matter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Mr. Gouvea’s faculty profile on Harvard’s website, he was a visiting scholar for the fall term and was not scheduled to teach classes in the spring.
Jonathan Wolfe is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news.
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