Judge orders release Tufts students detained by U.S. immigration in Gaza real estate
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release a Tufts University student from Turkey who was detained for six weeks in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana after she criticized an opinion criticizing the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions awarded bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, the center of the most prominent case in the campaign of President Donald Trump to expel pro-Palestine activists from American campuses.
The judge soon made a ruling after the federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s re-establishment of Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian campus activist who released another Vermont judge last week after immigration authorities also arrested him.
Ozturk was arrested on March 25 by masked arrest on a street in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, on a street near her home, and after the U.S. State Department revoked her student visa.
The only basic authority provided a piece of opinion co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper for revoking her visa, criticizing the school’s response to the call for students from companies that have ties to Israel and “recognize the Palestinian genocide.”
Her attorneys at the ACLU argued that her arrests and detention were illegally designed to punish her speech to be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and to relax others’ speeches.
CCTV video obtained by WBTS in Massachusetts shows Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was detained by U.S. immigration officials.
The 30-year-old doctoral student and Fulbright scholar was moved to a detention center in Basil, Louis, despite her attorney filing a lawsuit in Massachusetts the day she was arrested, and a judge there prohibited her from moving out of the state without 48-hour notice.
By the time the order fell, U.S. immigration and customs enforcement had taken her to Vermont, where she was briefly detained and then sent to Louisiana.
“Major Constitutional Concern”
Instead of dismissing her case, the Massachusetts judge transferred the case to Vermont and said it could be heard correctly there.
The meeting appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama then ordered Ozturk to move to Vermont so that it could be used when weighing orders for her release and considering the “major constitutional issues” she raised.
The federal appeals court ordered a transfer to Vermont by May 14 on Wednesday, but Sessions chose to continue the previously scheduled bail hearing and moved on Friday and allowed Ozturk to appear remotely after lawyers said she suffered an asthma attack during her detention worsened.
She suffered such as asthma attack in the middle of Friday's hearing. She told the judge that she suffered about twelve times during her detention, more than at any time in the past two years, and she blamed her on a “challenging” condition that was too crowded with space, poor air ventilation.
“During the ongoing triggers around me and the stress of my life right now, both duration and frequency have increased,” she said.
