Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student arrested in March for her political speech, has been released from the Louisiana detention center where she was being held in what she and her lawyers had argued was a breach of her constitutional rights.
A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.
The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
Öztürk could be seen hugging one of her attorneys after the judge ordered her release from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody.
She was released hours later, her legal team said. The judge will take up arguments in her underlying lawsuit at a later hearing.
“We are so relieved that Rümeysa 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.
On 25 March, Öztürk, 30, a Turkish national and PhD student studying child development, had been bundled into an unmarked car by agents to be taken away without due process and is battling a deportation order issued by the Trump administration after she co-authored an opinion article in a student newspaper that was critical of Israel.
Sessions said her continued detention “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens. Any one of them may now avoid exercising their first amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center from their home. For all of those reasons, the court finds that her continued detention cannot stand, that bail is necessary to make the habeas [petition] … effective.”
He added: “This is a woman who’s just totally committed to her academic career …there is absolutely no evidence that that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence. She has no criminal record … therefore, the court finds that she does not pose a danger to the community.”
He ordered the Trump administration to release Öztürk from custody “immediately” pending further proceedings, and said she was free to “return to her home in Massachusetts”.
The administration had been attempting to deport Öztürk under a rarely used immigration statute giving the secretary of state the authority to remove immigrants deemed harmful to US foreign policy.
The judge said there was no evidence from the government against Öztürk other than its view of her opinion article and therefore he supported her argument that “the reason that she has been detained is simply and purely the expression that she made … in violation of her first amendment rights.”
She appeared on video at the hearing on Friday dressed in a bright orange prison jumpsuit reminiscent of uniforms for terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo Bay.
According to court filings, Öztürk had suffered multiple asthma attacks in detention that she has struggled to get treated for, and had her hijab forcibly removed.
Following Öztürk’s initial testimony, her doctor, Jessica McCannon, testified about her diagnosis of Öztürk’s asthma. At one point, Öztürk had an asthma attack during McCannon’s testimony, which her lawyers had to interrupt. The judge then excused Öztürk and allowed her to temporarily step out of the room to use the bathroom.
Sara Johnson, director of graduate studies at Tufts University’s department of child study and human development, who is also Öztürk’s program adviser, also testified.
“Rümeysa is a critical part of our lab … My four PhD students, including Rümeysa, run a peer-review group of all of their work, and they are missing out on her very constructive yet extremely rigorous comments,” she said.
She added: “Rümeysa is also a mentor to many more junior students in our department and so they are missing those opportunities to learn from her.”
Öztürk’s legal team – which includes the ACLU and Clear (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), a legal clinic affiliated with the City University of New York – filed a challenge to her detention, in federal court in Vermont.
“I am relieved and ecstatic that Rümeysa has been ordered released. Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late. She has been imprisoned all these days for simply writing an op-ed that called for human rights and dignity for the people in Palestine. When did speaking up against oppression become a crime?” said Mahsa Khanbabai of Khanbabai Immigration Law.
Öztürk is one of several international students detained by the Trump administration over their pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.
“The government has spared no effort to evade accountability and deny her due process. Today, the court delivered reprieve and justice,” said Mudassar Toppa, a staff attorney at Clear.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
