Case of Turkish Tufts Student Arrested by ICE Will Be Heard in Vermont

Rumeysa Ozturk Credit: Courtesy/Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University

The case of a Tufts University grad student from Turkey who was plucked off a street by masked U.S. immigration authorities will be heard in Vermont, a federal judge ruled on Friday. The judge also ordered that Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, not be removed from the U.S. until the court decides otherwise.

Ozturk was arrested by plainclothes immigration authorities on March 25 while walking along a street in Somerville, Mass.

She was brought to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in St. Albans later that night, court records show, then put on a 5 a.m. flight from Burlington to Louisiana, where she has remained in custody since. ICE officials said she was transported halfway across the country because there were no beds available for a female detainee in Massachusetts.

Her attorneys, meanwhile, accused the government of moving her somewhere that they could expect a more sympathetic hearing. Louisiana has thrice voted in favor of Trump and, according to the New York Times, has one of the most conservative appeals courts in the nation.

The federal government claims Ozturk’s visa was revoked because she participated in the pro-Palestinian protests that swept across college campuses last year.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist, to tear up our university campuses,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week when asked about Ozturk.

But Ozturk’s friends have said she was not involved in any protests. Instead, her attorneys allege that she has been targeted in retaliation for an op-ed that she cowrote in the Tufts student newspaper last March criticizing the school’s response to the demands of student activists protesting the war in Gaza.

Ozturk is among a growing number of international students who have been threatened with deportation or denied entry into the U.S. over their alleged involvement in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Her attorneys petitioned a judge on the night of her arrest, seeking her release from custody. They argued that the government has violated her constitutional rights to free speech and due process.

First, however, the judge needed to decide where exactly Ozturk’s case should be heard: down in Louisiana or somewhere in New England. This was a complicated question, because Ozturk’s attorneys filed their petition in Massachusetts hours after she had been brought to Vermont.

Federal attorneys argued that the petition should therefore be either dismissed or heard in Louisiana. Ozturk’s attorneys pushed back, saying they couldn’t have possibly known where she was at the time.

“ICE’s deliberate and secretive hopscotch approach is an unlawful attempt to game the system,” Ozturk’s attorneys wrote in a court filing.