Judge rules Tufts student detained by US immigration authorities must be released

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to release a Tufts University student from Turkey who has been held for over six weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention facility after she co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

US District Judge William Sessions, during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, granted bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.

The judge ruled shortly after a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to re-detain Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian campus activist who a different judge in Vermont ordered released last week after immigration authorities arrested him as well.

Ozturk’s arrest on March 25 by masked, plainclothes law enforcement officers on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home, was captured in a viral video and occurred after the US Department of State revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities have provided for revoking her visa was an opinion piece she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”