Rümeysa Öztürk, a student visa holder at Tufts University from Turkey, was released on bail and freed from over six weeks of detention in a Louisiana immigration detention center after Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped her of her visa and ordered her deported for co-authoring an op-ed in her student newspaper.
Judge William Sessions III in the U.S. District Court of Vermont ordered Öztürk released on bail Friday, saying that the government had not presented a legitimate case for her detention and that she faced significant danger of health issues while in detention due to her asthma. Öztürk was freed from detention Friday evening.
“There is no evidence here as to the motivation [to detain and remove her] absent the consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said. Adding, “The reason she has been detained is simply and purely the expression she made in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”
Öztürk’s detention not only infringed on her own rights, but it also “chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said.
A fifth-year doctoral student, Öztürk was taken off the street of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes immigration officers wearing masks on March 25, after Rubio labeled her a threat to national security and revoked her student visa. What made her a threat, according to the government, was her co-authoring an opinion piece calling on the Tufts president to support a student vote to divest from Israeli companies amid Israel’s war in Gaza.
She was released and allowed to go back to Massachusetts to resume her studies at Tufts while still being subject to removal proceedings. Sessions denied the government’s request to impose a travel ban on Öztürk, stating that he did not think she was a flight risk.
“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk said upon her release, according to NBC’s Boston affiliate.
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Öztürk joined the hearing from the detention facility in Louisiana where she was held. It was her first public appearance since being detained more than six weeks ago.
She detailed her Ph.D. work at Tufts and the community work she engaged in with other students as well as the 12 asthma attacks she suffered since being detained. While Dr. Jessica McCannon, a doctor who had examined Öztürk’s asthma condition, testified, Öztürk suffered yet another asthma attack and had to leave the room.
Öztürk was not in the courtroom in Vermont because Immigration and Customs Enforcement had whisked her out of Massachusetts to a detention facility in Vermont and then quickly off to Louisiana in a bid to place any court case in the 5th Circuit courts, which are more hostile to immigrants. Over protestations from the government, her challenge to her detention was granted in Vermont.
The decision, and the stark language from the judge, was the latest to cut against the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on so-called antisemitism on college campuses by revoking the legal status of foreign students who participated in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza or who expressed sympathy with Palestinians and then placing them in detention.
Öztürk is the second student targeted by the Trump administration to be released from detention while their case proceeds.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student with permanent legal status, was released from detention in Minnesota after a judge ruled that the case against him amounted to a “chilling action by the government intended to shut down debate.”
Like Öztürk, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident, was whisked away to Louisiana after Rubio revoked his green card and had him arrested in New York. Khalil’s case is now before a district court judge in New Jersey, where he was first taken for detention.
Öztürk will now be free to continue her studies at Tufts, but remains subject to removal by the government. But she will be able to continue to fight that removal and the revocation of her student visa free from detention.
