Hundreds of people gathered in Somerville, Mass., On March 26, to demand the release of Rumeysa Ozturk, Turkish student at Tufts University, who was arrested by federal agents the day before.
Michael Casey / AP
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Michael Casey / AP
A federal judge of Vermont ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student from Tufts University and a Turkish national, immediately released from the Federal Guard. Friday, judge William K. Sessions, occurs more than six weeks after masked immigration agents recovered it in a Boston of suburban street in the repression of the Trump administration against pro-Palestinian student activists.
In his decision, the judge of sessions of the American district court of Vermont, said that his arrest and detention probably seemed to have been carried out only in retaliation for an editorial that she wrote in a newspaper of the campus criticizing the response of her school leaders to the War of Israel-Hamas in Gaza.
“I suggested to the government that they produce additional information that would suggest that it posed substantial risk,” said sessions. “And it was three weeks ago, and there was no evidence introduced by the government other than OP-ED. This is literally the case. There is no evidence here.”
The sessions added: “The court concludes that Ms. Öztürk raised a substantial request for a constitutional violation.”
He ordered his immediate release, rejecting, for the moment, the government’s request that immigration officials be authorized to place conditions on his freedom. The sessions called Öztürk’s experience “a traumatic incident” and said “His continuous detention potentially scares the speech of millions and millions of individuals in this country which are not citizens.”
The release of Ozturk is the last legal setback for the Trump administration as he seeks to make the president’s promise to deport non-citizens who have embarked on what the White House calls anti-Semitic activism of the campus. Last week, another federal judge ordered the government of Release Mohsen MahdawiA Palestinian student protest student at Columbia University whom he also tries to deport, despite his status as a legal permanent resident.
Like Mahdawi, Öztürk still faces a possible deportation. But Friday’s decision means that it will not be locked up while it fights the government’s attempt to revoke its legal status.
“We are relieved and ecstatic that she was ordered by the Liberation,” said her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, in a statement. “Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late. It was imprisoned every day for having simply written an editorial which called for human rights and dignity for the inhabitants of Palestine. When the speech against oppression became a crime? When does the word against the genocide become something to imprison?”
In a statement, TUFTS University said that the school was satisfied with the decision: “We are impatient to greet it on the campus to resume its doctoral studies.”
Öztürk, sitting next to Khanbabai, appeared at the hearing via zoom to the southern ice treatment center. She testified about the way her time there, living in an infested cell of overcrowded mice with 23 other women, aggravated her problem of chronic asthma. At one point during the hearing, she said that she was suffering from an asthma attack and had temporarily left the room.
In a press release, the Ministry of Internal Security did not directly deal with the judge’s order.
“The visas provided to foreign students to live and study in the United States are a privilege and not a right,” said the press release, adding that the Trump administration “we will continue to fight for the arrest, the detention and the abolition of foreigners who do not have the right to be in this country.”
Öztürk’s struggle to be released from detention has become one of the most important cases to find out if the government can arrest and expel non-citizens who, according to the government, threaten the interests of American foreign policies.
After his arrest, the Trump administration accused Öztürk of engaging in “activities in support of Hamas” and, according to DocumentsThe Ministry of Internal Security determined that it had been involved in associations which “can undermine the American foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students”.
The defenders, however, say that Öztürk and other prisoners by the administration are intended to exercise their freedom of expression. His lawyers have filed a legal action contesting his arrest and detention as unconstitutional reprisals for his activism, saying that they were “conceived to punish his speech and cool the discourse of others”.
To date, the government has not produced any evidence supporting its accusations against Öztürk other than 2024 OP-ED She co-written for the Tufts campus newspaper. In this document, she criticized the school administrators for not having done more for condemning the War of Israel to Gaza, which she called a “plausible genocide”.
She was arrested on March 25 by plainclothes ice agents who surrounded her when she was walking dinner with friends. Four days earlier, the State Department had quietly canceled its student visa, according to court documents. The agents quickly led it from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and Vermont, before driving it the next day in Louisiana.
The sessions judge provided arguments later this month in his hearing room in Burlington, in Vermont, to examine the constitutional issues in the case.
