Immigration judge rejects Trump effort to deport pro-Palestinian student over op-ed

By Reuters 10 February 2026, 2:03 am

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File - Tufts University student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested by US immigration agents while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, talks to reporters on arriving back in Boston, May 10, 2025, a day after she was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center on the orders of a federal judge. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)

An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers say.

Lawyers for the Turkish student detail the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.

An immigration judge on January 29 concluded the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union write.

Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, says the decision was issued by Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Ozturk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March on a street in Massachusetts after the US Department of State revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the US government,” Ozturk said in a statement.

The immigration judge’s decision is not itself public, and the administration could challenge it before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the US Department of Justice.

DHS, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to a request for comment.

The arrest of Ozturk, a child development researcher, in the Boston suburb of Somerville, was captured in a viral video that shocked many and drew criticism from civil rights groups.

The former Fulbright scholar was held for 45 days in a detention facility in Louisiana until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had briefly been held, ordered her immediately released after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights.