Judge orders Tufts scholar Rumeysa Ozturk released from ICE detention after ‘serious’ First Amendment and due process questions
A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of a Tufts University scholar who has been locked up in an immigration detention center for more than six weeks.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student studying child development at the Massachusetts school, was arrested by masked plain-clothes federal agents outside her apartment in March.
She is among several international students at the center of Donald Trump administration’s targeting of on-campus advocacy for Palestine during Israel’s war in Gaza. Her visa was revoked and she was moved to a remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Louisiana, where she was placed in deportation proceedings.
Ozturk, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and taupe hijab, appeared virtually from inside an all-white room at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, roughly 1,700 miles away from Friday’s bail hearing inside a Burlington, Vermont federal courtroom.
It marked the first time Ozturk was seen by the public since her arrest on March 25.
The order from District Judge William K. Sessions III will grant her immediate release from custody while she continues her parallel legal battles challenging her immigration proceedings and the constitutionality of what her attorneys argue is a retaliatory arrest.
“Simply and purely,” she was detained for “the expression she made or shared in the op-ed” critical of Israel, Sessions told the court.
“I put the government on notice they should introduce any such evidence. …. That was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence,” Sessions said. “That literally is the case. There is no evidence here as to the motivation, absent consideration of the op-ed.”
Her health has “deteriorated” while in ICE custody, and her arrest “chills the speech of potentially millions of millions of people in this country who are not citizens” who now fear “being whisked away to a detention center,” Sessions added.
The government did not appear to possess any evidence backing up claims of antisemitism and support for a terrorist organization to justify her arrest, according to court filings and government memos.
The only apparent evidence against her is an op-ed she co-wrote with Tufts students in a student newspaper that criticized Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Right now, the clear message that the government is sending to everyone who is watching is that you can be detained thousands of miles from your home for more than six weeks for writing a single student newspaper article,” according to Monica Allard, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Vermont.
In her remote testimony, Ozturk described her academic work in studying social media use among children and young people, which has been “impossible” to continue while in ICE detention.
“The work I do is very meaningful,” she said.
