Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, for now, will remain in a detention center in Louisiana where she has been locked up for more than 100 days.
A panel of federal appeals court judges have temporarily blocked her transfer to Vermont, after a judge ordered her moved from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana by this Thursday.
The judges are pausing her transfer while they consider a challenge from Donald Trump’s administration to keep her in Louisiana. Oral arguments in the case are set for May 6.
“Rumeysa Ozturk never should have been arrested and detained, period,” her legal team said in a Tuesday statement to The Independent. “We are ready to argue her case before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and we won’t stop fighting until she is free.”
The case of Ozturk, a Turkish international student and Fulbright scholar working towards her doctorate in child development, is among several high-profile cases at the center of the Trump administration’s targeting of international students for their advocacy for Palestine during Israel’s war in Gaza.
Last month, her visa was revoked and she was arrested and detained by plain-clothes federal agents in what her lawyers argue is a retaliatory attempt to deport her over an op-ed in a student newspaper.
She has been inside the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile since March 26. She shares a cell with more than 20 other people, according to Ozturk’s account of her time at the jail.
On April 18, Vermont District Judge William K. Session ordered Ozturk’s transfer to a detention center in the state, noting that her case has “raised significant constitutional concerns with her arrest and detention which merit full and fair consideration in this forum.”
A move from the Trump administration to block the ruling “largely recycles the same arguments” the judge had already rejected, he wrote on April 24.
The Trump administration appealed the order, arguing that Ozturk can be deported under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked against dozens of international students who he claims have “adverse” impacts to the country’s foreign policy.
But he administration 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.
Last year, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in a student newspaper calling on the Massachusetts university to divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel in an effort to hold Israel accountable “for clear violations of international law” for its campaign in Gaza.
A memo from the State Department asserts that Homeland Security investigators and searches of government databases have not produced any evidence that Ozturk engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements in support of any terrorist organization.
That followed a memo from Homeland Security officials claiming Ozturk “engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”
That language is identical to a description of Ozturk on a website run by pro-Israel activists who are identifying students and activists who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza for law enforcement. That group later appeared to take credit for her arrest.
A group of Democratic members of Congress met with Ozturk in Louisiana earlier this month.
“What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and Reps. Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley wrote in The New York Times after their trip.
“There is no doubt that Rumeysa is a political prisoner for having taken a pen to paper to stand up for the human rights of the Palestinian people,” her attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said in a statement shared with The Independent earlier this month. “The Trump Administration has no evidence of wrongdoing so they use delay tactics and abuse our legal system in an attempt to cover up their weak arguments.”
Ozturk, 30, has repeatedly experienced asthma attacks while in detention, she wrote in a statement to the court. She wasn’t allowed to go outside during her first week at the facility, where conditions are “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane,” and doctors and nurses are “rude and uncaring,” she wrote. A nurse removed her hijab without asking, she said
“I pray everyday for my release so I can go back to my home and community,” she wrote. “I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work.”
