Turkish Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk scored another legal victory after a U.S. federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Monday to restore her SEVIS student-immigration database record. The judge ruled that authorities likely acted unlawfully when they terminated her status.
Chief Judge Denise Casper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction, concluding that Öztürk is "likely to succeed” on her claim that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) action was "arbitrary and capricious.” She directed officials to restore Öztürk's SEVIS record retroactive to March 25 – the day that masked ICE agents detained her in Somerville, Massachusetts.
SEVIS is a federal database administered by ICE and used to track foreign students, and terminating a student’s record prevents them from working and jeopardizes their legal presence in the country.
In a statement released through the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Öztürk said she was grateful for the decision, adding: "I earnestly hope that no one else experiences the injustices I have suffered.”
"I hope one day we can create a world where everyone uses education to learn, connect, civically engage and benefit others – rather than criminalize and punish those whose opinions differ from our own. While I am grateful for the court's decision, I still feel a great deal of grief for all the educational rights I have been arbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies,” she wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment.
Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Ph.D. student in child development at Tufts University, was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents who surrounded her outside her Somerville, Massachusetts home on March 25, which was captured in a viral video.
Her student visa was subsequently revoked by the State Department, and she was transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, where she spent six weeks before a federal judge in Vermont ordered her release on May 9, citing her asthma and the lack of justification for her continued detention.
Her detention followed online targeting by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which targeted her for co-authoring a March 2024 op-ed in The Tufts Daily that criticized the university’s response to student demands for divestment from Israel, calling for the acknowledgment of a "Palestinian genocide.”
The Trump administration has alleged that Öztürk engaged in activities supporting the Palestinian group Hamas, but the administration has not presented evidence to substantiate that claim.
Öztürk was among several international students swept up in the Trump administration’s widening crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists.
