A federal judge in Vermont ordered the Trump administration on Friday to release Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student whose sudden arrest in March led to a public outcry.
The judge, William K. Sessions III, said Ms. Ozturk should be freed immediately. “Her continued detention cannot stand,” Judge Sessions said, adding that her continued detention “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”
Ms. Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, has been in detention since March 25, when she was surrounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and plainclothes outside her home in Somerville, Mass. The agents handcuffed and hustled her into an unmarked car, and then drove her through New Hampshire to Vermont, where she was put on a plane to a detention center in Louisiana.
In seeking her release, her lawyers have accused the government of detaining her in unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay critical of Israel that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year.
Government lawyers in a hearing earlier this week declined to discuss questions about speech raised by an appeals court judge. But Judge Sessions did not mince words on Friday, suggesting the government was trying to deport Ms. Ozturk based on the slenderest of evidence that she had posed a threat to American foreign policy interests.
“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” he said in granting her release.
Video footage of Ms. Ozturk’s detention went viral, leading to public outrage at her treatment and criticism that the government is abusing the immigration system to deport international students.
Ms. Ozturk has spent six weeks in detention in Louisiana and has endured unsanitary conditions that have triggered increasingly severe asthma attacks, her lawyers said in court documents.
Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ordered that she be transferred to Vermont by next week to attend a bail hearing. But Judge Sessions decided to hold the hearing with Ms. Ozturk still in Louisiana and ordered her release.
Before her detention, the Department of Homeland Security concluded that Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
Following her arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio commented on Ms. Ozturk’s detention at a news conference, saying that she not been given a visa to “become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
During the hearing Friday, the government’s lawyer, Michael Drescher, called no witnesses and hardly spoke. When he did speak, it was mainly to raise technical issues about the conditions of her bail.
Ms. Ozturk’s friends said she had been quiet and studious, devoted to her study.
“Had this occurred in any other country, Americans would shudder at the thought and thank the founders for drafting the Constitution,” Ms. Ozturk’s lawyers wrote in a court brief late last month.
Judge Session said Ms. Ozturk is free to return home. “She’s also free to travel to Massachusetts and Vermont as she sees fit,” he added.
