A Tufts University student from Turkiye was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb.
\nUS District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she\u2019s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school\u2019s response to Israel\u2019s war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue.
\n\u201cDespite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,\u201d attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.
\nEven before her release, Ozturk\u2019s supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of \u201cShe is free!\u201d
\n\u201cWhat 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,\u201d Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s decision.
\n\u201cCompleting my Ph.D. is very important to me,\u201d she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested.
\nOzturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, but that he might amend his release order to consider any specific conditions by ICE in consultation with her lawyers.
\nSessions said the government had offered no evidence about why Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed.
\n\u201cThis is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career,\u201d Sessions said. \u201cThis is someone who probably doesn\u2019t have a whole lot of other things going on other than reaching out to other members of the community in a caring and compassionate way.\u201d
\nA message seeking comment was emailed Friday afternoon to the US Justice Department\u2019s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
\nSessions told Acting US Attorney Michael Drescher he wants to know immediately when she is released.
\nSessions said Ozturk raised serious concerns about her First Amendment and due process rights, as well as her health. She testified Friday that she has had 12 asthma attacks since her detention, starting with a severe one at the Atlanta airport.
\n\u201cI was afraid, and I was crying,\u201d she said.
\nImmigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.
\nOzturk\u2019s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.
\nOzturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university\u2019s response to student activists demanding that Tufts \u201cacknowledge the Palestinian genocide,\u201d disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
\nOzturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings. She is expected to return to New England on Saturday at the earliest.
\n\u201cI will follow all the rules,\u201d she said.
\nA State Department memo said Ozturk\u2019s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions \u201d\u2018may undermine US foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization\u2019 including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.\u201d
\nA Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
\n\u201cWhen did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?\u201d Khanbabai asked. \u201cI am thankful that the courts have been ruling in favor of detained political prisoners, like Rumeysa.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Tufts University student from Turkiye was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb. US District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she\u2019s been illegally …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":80806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80808,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80793\/revisions\/80808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}