Washington — Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral candidate at Tufts University, was released from immigration custody Friday, hours after a judge ordered her to be freed on bail.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions, who is presiding over the case, said at the conclusion of Friday’s bail hearing that Ozturk raised “very substantial” and “very significant” claims that her First Amendment and due process rights were violated when she was taken into custody following the Trump administration’s revocation of her student visa in March.
“Her continued detention cannot stand,” he said.
Ozturk was released by the government later Friday afternoon, one of her attorneys, Sonya Levitova, confirmed to CBS News.
“The government sent masked, plainclothes agents to kidnap Rümeysa off the street and lock her up for writing an op-ed. She has been a political prisoner for six weeks. Now that she’s free and can resume her studies and rejoin her community at Tufts, we look forward to seeing the government in court to vindicate Rümeysa’s rights in full,” Levitova said in a statement.
Ozturk was held at an immigration facility in Basile, Louisiana, where she was transferred after she was detained in Massachusetts. But the court said she can now return to her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, with no travel restrictions. The bail hearing in her challenge to her confinement came after a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration had until May 14 to comply with a district court’s order to transfer Ozturk to immigration custody in Vermont.
Ozturk, who appeared remotely from Louisiana and testified before the court, was seen hugging her lawyer after Sessions delivered his decision from the bench.
The Trump administration has said that the underlying justification for taking Ozturk’s student visa away rested on an opinion piece she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper last year about Israel’s war with Hamas. But Sessions said Ozturk “simply and purely” was detained for “the expression she made or shared in the op-ed.”
“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed. I mean, that literally is the case,” Sessions said. “There is no evidence here as to the motivation, absent the consideration of the op-ed.”
He told the court that creates a “very significant, substantial claim that the op-ed — that is that the expression of one’s opinion as ordinarily protected by the First Amendment — formed the basis of this particular detention.”
“There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence,” Sessions said. “She has no criminal record. She has done nothing other than essentially attend her university and expand her contacts within the community in such a supportive way.”
Mike Rodman, a spokesperson for Tufts University, said in a statement that the school is “pleased that the court has approved Rumeysa’s request to be released on bail, and we look forward to welcoming her back to campus to resume her doctoral studies. As we have noted previously, Rumeysa is a student in good standing, and nothing in her co-authored op-ed of March 26, 2024, in The Tufts Daily student newspaper violated either the university’s gatherings, protests, and demonstrations policy or its Declaration on Freedom of Expression. We hope that she is able to rejoin our community as soon as possible.”
In addition to hearing testimony from Ozturk, her lawyers also questioned her doctor, her adviser in the doctoral program at Tufts and an official with a Burlington, Vermont, organization that offered pretrial services to Ozturk if she is released. The government did not put forward any witnesses to provide testimony.
During the proceedings, and while her doctor was testifying about Ozturk’s asthma diagnosis, a lawyer appearing alongside her in Louisiana said Ozturk was suffering from an asthma attack, and she was briefly excused for 10 minutes.
One of Ozturk’s lawyers said that she would face “significant health risks” if she remained in detention and urged Sessions to immediately grant her bail.
Allowing her to remain in custody shows that “you can be detained thousands of miles from your home for more than six weeks for writing a single news article,” her attorney told the court.
Ozturk alleges that her detainment violates her First and Fifth Amendment rights. She is among several hundred international students attending American universities who have had their student visas revoked after they were accused of criticizing Israel or participating in pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses.
Ozturk’s attorneys said that an immigration judge denied bond for the Turkish national during a hearing last month after they asked an immigration judge to release her as her immigration case proceeds. Her lawyers said the Department of Homeland Security presented one document to support their opposition to Ozturk’s bond request: a one-paragraph State Department memo revoking her student visa.
The immigration judge, Ozturk’s attorneys said, denied bond based on the “untenable conclusion” that she was “both a flight risk and a danger to the community.”
Ozturk was taken into custody by masked, plainclothes immigration authorities outside her Somerville residence on March 25 after her student visa was revoked by the Trump administration. She was not informed about the revocation before she was detained, her lawyers said.
Courtesy of the Ozturk family via Reuters 
As justification for her arrest and detention, the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Ozturk “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization,'” according to court filings.
Ozturk had co-authored an opinion piece that was published in the Tufts’ student newspaper last year that criticized the school for its dismissal of several resolutions adopted by the undergraduate student senate as a “sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.” The op-ed did not mention Hamas.
Tufts president Sunil Kumar submitted a declaration defending Ozturk and supporting her motion regarding her release, writing that the university “has no information to support the allegations that she was engaged in activities at Tufts that warrant her arrest and detention.”
After Ozturk was taken into custody, she was transferred to New Hampshire and then Vermont, where she was kept overnight before putting her on a plane to Louisiana. The 30-year-old student has been detained at an immigration facility in Basile since late March.
In a court filing by Ozturk, she said that she has suffered multiple serious asthma attacks in ICE detention and has received limited medical attention at the Louisiana detention center. She said that she is one of 24 people in a detention cell that has a sign stating the room has a capacity for 14.
During Friday’s bail hearing, Ozturk told the court that she has suffered 12 asthma attacks since she was detained, which have become “longer and harder to stop.” Four of them occurred since Ozturk disclosed her history to the court in a declaration last week, she said. There are “constant triggers” that can bring on an attack, including the room conditions at the facility in Louisiana, limited access to the outdoors and stress from her confinement, Ozturk said.
“It is affecting me in a very negative way, alongside other women living here, not accessing enough medical care and medication,” she said.
If she is released while her case is adjudicated, Tufts will provide Ozturk with housing, she said. Ozturk can continue working toward completion of her doctorate if she is let out of detainment, she told the court.
Ozturk’s whereabouts in the hours after she was taken into custody kicked off a battle over where her habeas petition should be filed and whether federal district courts even have the authority to consider the challenge. While initially filed in court in Massachusetts, a judge there transferred her case to Vermont, given that Ozturk was in the state at the time her lawyers filed her habeas petition.
The Massachusetts judge who was assigned Ozturk’s petition seeking release had swiftly issued an order barring the government from transferring her out of the state. But by then, Ozturk was in Vermont and hours later was flown to Louisiana.
Referencing this initial order, Sessions called it an “extraordinary situation” in which a federal judge ordered the government not to take Ozturk out of Massachusetts, and then did not inform the court that she was in a different location.
The Justice Department had argued that the case should proceed in Louisiana, as that is where Ozturk was confined. They had sought, unsuccessfully, to have her challenge to her detention tossed out.
Sessions, who sits on the federal district court in Vermont, ruled last month that Ozturk had to be transferred from Louisiana to ICE custody in Vermont. Separate from her bail hearing, the judge will weigh the merits of Ozturk’s challenge to her confinement on May 22.
The Trump administration appealed that decision and asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to block it. But the three-judge panel rejected the request and said federal immigration authorities had to transfer Ozturk to Vermont, as Sessions ordered them to do.
“Permitting Ozturk’s transfer will provide her ready access to legal and medical services, address concerns about the conditions of her confinement, and expedite resolution of this matter — all of which are required, as the court below noted, to proceed expeditiously,” Judges Barrington Parker, Susan Carney and Alison Nathan said in their unanimous opinion. “At stake, too, is Ozturk’s ability to participate meaningfully in her habeas proceedings.”
