A U.S. federal judge in Vermont on Monday said he is considering whether he has jurisdiction over the case of a Turkish Tufts University student detained by immigration officials in Louisiana, and whether to hold a hearing in May as she challenges her detention by immigration authorities.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions took under advisement arguments over Rümeysa Öztürk, 30. After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Basile, Louisiana.
Öztürk’s lawyers are challenging the legal authority for ICE detention. They are asking that she be immediately released from custody, or in the alternative, be returned to Vermont for further proceedings.
Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Ph.D. student in child and human development at Tufts University, was detained on March 25 by masked U.S. ICE agents outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Her arrest came shortly after she was targeted online by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which aimed at her for co-authoring an op-ed in the campus newspaper criticizing Tufts University's response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, which killed nearly 51,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
Her lawyers argue that the arrest and continued detention violate her constitutional rights, including her First Amendment right to free speech and Fifth Amendment protections.
They are asking the court to either release her on bail or order her transfer from a detention facility in Basile, Louisiana, to Vermont, where her legal team filed an emergency habeas petition the night of her arrest.
"These were unusual steps that were designed to punish Ms. Ozturk for her protected speech – chill her speech and send a very chilling message to everyone who was watching," said Jessie Rossman, one of Öztürk’s attorneys, during the hearing. "If you engage in speech that the administration disagrees with, you will be punished."
Öztürk’s legal team is seeking her release on bail or a court order that would bring her from Louisiana to Vermont, where she was briefly held before being flown south and where her legal team filed an emergency petition on the night of her arrest.
Sessions said he was considering holding an evidentiary hearing in May to examine the circumstances of Öztürk’s arrest and continued detention.
Öztürk’s lawyers cited a Washington Post investigation published on Sunday that revealed that the State Department had found no evidence connecting Öztürk to anti-Semitic activities or any support for "terrorism." Despite this, she was arrested days later, without notice, and has now been detained for nearly a month.
"She is desperate to return to Tufts to continue her education," Rossman said, adding that the court had received "nearly two dozen sworn declarations" affirming her commitment to her studies and rebutting any claim that she poses a flight risk or danger to the community.
"On the other side of the aisle," Öztürk’s lawyer continued, "(The government) was certainly on notice that the petitioner has been requesting bail now for over two weeks, and there's been no such submission from the government, and we have no reason to believe that they would be able to do so."
Öztürk has not been charged with any crime.
Asked about her case last month, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio defended the revocation of her student visa, saying: "We give you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses."
The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that Öztürk engaged in activities supporting Hamas – a group designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. – but the administration has yet to present any evidence to substantiate that claim.
