International Student Op/Ed Writer Released from Immigrant Detention

The Washington Post reports that the Tufts University graduate student who was grabbed off the street in March and detained for co-writing an opinion piece in a student newspaper was freed yesterday after a federal judge ordered her release.

“Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was seized by masked federal agents outside her home near Boston, then driven to Vermont and flown to Louisiana, where she had remained in detention.”

U,S. District Judge William Sessions said  that Ozturk’s detention constituted “a continued infringement” on her First Amendment and due process rights. It also “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

Sessions described Ozturk as someone “committed to her academic career,” adding that there was “absolutely no evidence” that she posed any danger to the community.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not directly comment on the judge’s order. “Visas provided to foreign students to live and study in the United States are a privilege not a right,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The court’s latest order in Ozturk’s case is here.

The Associated Press reports that another student arrested as he was about to finalize his U.S. citizenship accused Columbia eroding democracy with its handling of campus protests against the war in Gaza.  Mohsen Mahdawi, who led protests at the Columbia in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in immigrant detention before a judge ordered his release. Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the government’s request to stay that order, saying the Trump administration’s jurisdictional arguments were unlikely to succeed and that it hadn’t shown that Mahdawi’s release has caused irreparable harm.

“[T]he practical effect of the relief the government seeks would be Mahdawi’s re-detention. Individual liberty substantially outweighs the government’s weak assertions of administrative and logistical costs,” Judges Barrington Parker, Alison Nathan and Susan Carney wrote in the ruling.  For addition reporting on the ruling, see here.  

KJ