A federal judge in Vermont on Friday released a Turkish Tufts University student detained in a Louisiana immigration center more than six weeks after she was arrested while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, allowing her to return to her studies.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions in Burlington released Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she’s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Details of her release and travel plans were not immediately available, and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement database still listed her as detained Friday afternoon in Louisiana, where her immigration proceedings will continue. But her supporters cheered the decision, punctuating a news conference held by her attorneys with chants of “She is free!”
“What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. “There’s absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.”
Appearing by video for her bail hearing, Ozturk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate degree focusing on children and social media while appearing remotely at her bail hearing from the Louisiana center. She and her lawyer hugged after hearing the judge’s decision.
“Completing my Ph.D. is very important to me,” she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested.
Ozturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to…