Bail hearing to be held today for Tufts student detained by ICE

Washington —  A federal judge is holding a bail hearing Friday for Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral candidate who was detained by immigration authorities after the Trump administration revoked her student visa.

Ozturk is currently detained at an immigration facility in Basile, Louisiana, where she was transferred after she was taken into custody in Massachusetts in March. The bail hearing in her challenge to her confinement comes 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 will appear remotely from Louisiana, according to her legal team.

Ozturk alleges that her detainment violates her First and Fifth Amendment rights. She is among the 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immigration authorities outside her Somerville, Massachusetts, residence on March 25 after her student visa was revoked by the Trump administration.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.

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.

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 Justice Department, however, has argued that the case should proceed in Louisiana, as that is where Ozturk is confined. They have sought, unsuccessfully so far, to have her challenge to her detention tossed out.

U.S. District Judge William 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.”