Trump administration urges court to prevent release of anti-Israel students facing deportation

The Trump administration urges a US appeals court to allow immigration authorities to continue to detain anti-Israel students at Tufts University and Columbia University who were arrested after engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.

A lawyer with the US Department of Justice asks the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals to pause lower-court orders requiring Tuft’s Rumeysa Ozturk to be transferred to Vermont for a bail hearing on Friday and allowing Columbia’s Mohsen Mahdawi to be released last week.

Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign says those orders by two judges in Vermont should never have been issued, as Congress has made clear that any challenges to the government’s decisions to deport someone must proceed in immigration court.

“The result is precisely what Congress took particular care to avoid: simultaneous proceedings in both immigration courts and district courts considering the same issues regarding the removal of aliens from the United States,” he says.

He urges the court to allow the administration to avoid moving Ozturk from the Louisiana detention facility where she is being held and to allow immigration authorities to swiftly take Mahdawi back into custody.

But lawyers for Ozturk and Mahdawi counter that their lawsuits are not about the government’s ability to seek their deportation but instead are focused on claims they were unlawfully detained for making constitutionally protected statements critical of Israel’s actions during the Gaza war.