A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England for hearings to determine whether her rights were violated.
A judicial panel of the New York-based U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk after lawyers representing her and the U.S. Justice Department presented arguments at a hearing Tuesday. Ozturk has been detained for six weeks.
The court ordered Ozturk to be transferred to ICE custody in Vermont no later than May 14.
A district court judge in Vermont had earlier ordered that the 30-year-old doctoral student be brought to the state for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.
The Justice Department, which appealed that ruling, said that an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over her case.
In an arrest caught on camera, Ozturk was surrounded by a group of masked federal agents in plain clothes as she walked along a street near her off-campus apartment on March 25.
Ozturk, a PhD student in Tufts’ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was handcuffed and quickly whisked away.
In less than 24 hours, she was transported from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont, then down to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana, where she’s remained jailed since.
Federal authorities have alleged that Ozturk engaged in activities supporting the terrorist group Hamas and revoked her visa.
Ozturk’s lawyer Marty Rosenbluth argued that she hasn’t been accused of any crime and that the Trump administration targeted her for arrest, detention, and deportation in retaliation for an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper.
Rosenbluth said the federal judge denied his client’s bond based on an “untenable conclusion.”
“Yesterday was a complete violation of due process and the rule of law. The immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration’s attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights,” Rosenbluth said in a statement. “The government’s entire case against Rumeysa is based on the same one-paragraph memo from the State Department to ICE that just points back to Rumeysa’s op-ed.”
In a court filing, Ozturk said she is one of 24 people in a cell that has a sign stating a capacity for 14.
“When they do the inmate count, we are threatened to not leave our beds or we will lose privileges, which means that we are often stuck waiting in our beds for hours,” she said. “At mealtimes, there is so much anxiety because there is no schedule when it comes. … They threaten to close the door if we don’t leave the room in time, meaning we won’t get a meal.”
Ozturk has said she wants to go back to Tufts so she can finish her degree, which she has been working on for five years.
Ozturk is among several people with ties to American universities whose visas were revoked or have been stopped from entering the U.S. after they were accused of attending demonstrations or publicly expressing support for Palestinians.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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