Judge orders immediate release of Tufts student detained by US immigration authorities
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to immediately release a Tufts University student from Turkey who has been held for over six weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention facility after she co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.U.S.District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, granted bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.The judge said Ozturk, whose arrest in Massachusetts in March 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.”“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.White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the judge’s ruling another sign of what he considers a “judicial coup” in the United States.Several parts of the president’s hardline immigration agenda have been blocked by judges.“We cannot individually litigate every single visa that we want to revoke,” Miller told reporters.The judge ruled shortly after a federal appeals court rejected, opens new tab the Trump administration’s bid to re-detain Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian campus activist who a different judge in Vermont ordered released last week after immigration authori...