Tufts student Ozturk released from US immigration custody, citing First Amendment rights
A Tufts University student from Turkey who was held for over six weeks in an immigration detention center in Louisiana after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to “Israel’s war in Gaza” was released from custody on Friday after a federal judge granted her bail.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions, during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
The judge said Ozturk, whose arrest was captured in a viral video, had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was “simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”
“Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said. “Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center.”
Ozturk was arrested on March 25 by masked, plainclothes officers on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.
The sole basis authorities have provided for revoking her visa was an opinion piece she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to “Israel” and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
Ozturk appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, with arguments in her underlying lawsuit to be heard at a later hearing.
“We are so relieved that Rumeysa will soon be back in Massachusetts, and won’t stop fighting until she is free for good,” Jessie Rossman, a lawyer for Ozturk at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in a statement.
Massachusetts-based Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ozturk housing upon her release. In a statement, a university spokesperson said it hoped she would be able to rejoin its community as soon as possible to resume her doctoral studies.
US Sen. Bernie Sanders hailed the release of Ozturk, saying that President Donald Trump and his colleagues “should read the Constitution and, especially, the First Amendment.”
