A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of a Tufts University scholar who has been locked up in an immigration detention center for more than six weeks.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student studying child development at the Massachusetts school, was arrested by masked plain-clothes federal agents outside her apartment in March.
She is among several international students at the center of Donald Trump administration’s targeting of on-campus advocacy for Palestine during Israel’s war in Gaza. Her visa was revoked and she was moved to a remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Louisiana, where she was placed in deportation proceedings.
Ozturk, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and taupe hijab, appeared virtually from inside an all-white room at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, roughly 1,700 miles away from Friday’s bail hearing inside a Burlington, Vermont federal courtroom.
It marked the first time Ozturk was seen by the public since her arrest on March 25.
The order from District Judge William K. Sessions III will grant her immediate release from custody while she continues her parallel legal battles challenging her immigration proceedings and the constitutionality of what her attorneys argue is a retaliatory arrest.
“Simply and purely,” she was detained for “the expression she made or shared in the op-ed” critical of Israel, Sessions told the court.
“I put the government on notice they should introduce any such evidence. …. That was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence,” Sessions said. “That literally is the case. There is no evidence here as to the motivation, absent consideration of the op-ed.”
Her health has “deteriorated” while in ICE custody, and her arrest “chills the speech of potentially millions of millions of people in this country who are not citizens” who now fear “being whisked away to a detention center,” Sessions added.
The government does not appear to possess any evidence backing up claims of antisemitism and support for a terrorist organization to justify her arrest, according to court filings and government memos.
The only apparent evidence against her is an op-ed she co-wrote with Tufts students in a student newspaper that criticized Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Right now, the clear message that the government is sending to everyone who is watching is that you can be detained thousands of miles from your home for more than six weeks for writing a single student newspaper article,” according to Monica Allard, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Vermont.
In her remote testimony, Ozturk described her academic work in studying social media use among children and young people, which has been “impossible” to continue while in ICE detention.
“The work I do is very meaningful,” she said.
She hopes her work can “contribute to the well-being and development of children all around the world,” she said.
Ozturk, whose faculty adviser testified to her intimate connections within her department and the broader Tufts community, also helped organize an event to grieve for children killed in war, “from Gaza to Israel, from Russia to Ukraine, from Congo to Haiti, from Sudan to Yemen, from Cameroon to Afghanistan,” Ozturk said.
“It was a project of poetry and art and silence,” she said.
Ozturk described the event as an attempt for academics who are typically removed from the subjects of their work to “create a safe space to grieve.”
She has experienced asthma attacks more than a dozen times since her detention in Louisiana, where she faces “constant exposure to dust,” “no proper ventilation” and limited time outside while locked in a small cell she shares with 23 people.
While trying to get treatment, a nurse at the facility told her to “take the thing off my head,” said Ozturk, gesturing at her hijab.
In the middle of a doctor’s testimony about her asthma diagnosis, Ozturk said was experiencing another asthma attack and excused herself from the room.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice declined to cross examine Ozturk.
They also declined to cross examine Ozturk’s adviser.
“With every day that goes by, she’s missing opportunities for her future career,” said Sara Johnson, an associate professor at the university’s Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study & Human Development.
Ozturk was on track to complete her PhD by February 2026, but she is in a “critical juncture” for her studies.
She is also scheduled to return to teaching a program for high school students this summer.
“She’s really not replaceable. It’s a course she designed herself from scratch. … They’d have to cancel it,” Johnson said.
Johnson said Ozturk’s absence has been “devastating” for both the department and students she mentors as well as her colleagues and friends at the university.
Ozturk is allergic but always asked to see pictures of Johnson’s cats and wrote down the dates of her cat’s cancer treatments to check in, Johnson said. Ozturk also befriended Johnson’s mother, whose “bucket list” trip is to visit Turkey, she said. Ozturk talked with her for hours about her home country.
