Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University doctoral student grabbed by ICE in Massachusetts and imprisoned in Louisiana, was granted bail from ICE detention Friday. Protesters supporting Ozturk protested at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., in March. File Photo by Taylor Coester/EPA-EFE
May 9 (UPI) — Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University doctoral student grabbed by ICE in Massachusetts and imprisoned in Louisiana, was granted bail from ICE detention Friday.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions said at the end of the hearing that Ozturk raised “very substantial” and “very significant” claims of First Amendment and due process rights violations in her case.
He said her detention cannot stand.
Sessions said, “Ozturk is free to return to her home in Massachusetts. She’s also free to travel to Massachusetts and Vermont as she sees fit, and I am not going to put a travel restriction on her, because, frankly, I don’t find that she poses any risk of flight.”
The judge ordered the government to immediately release her.
Ozturk began coughing at one point during the hearing and she rushed out of the room to get her inhaler. She attended the hearing virtually.
A defense lawyer had urged the judge to grant immediate bail, telling him Ozturk faces “significant health risks” if she stays in ICE custody.
The 2nd Circuit’s U.S. Court of Appeals had ordered Wednesday that she be transferred back to Vermont.
Her student visa was revoked immediately and she was taken into custody by armed masked agents without warning March 25 in Somerset, Mass., after she co-wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper.
She was imprisoned in a Louisiana detention center afterward. Tufts University demanded her release “without delay.”
Ozturk is a Turkish national and was legally studying in the United States until the Trump administration’s State Department abruptly revoked her visa without prior notification.
Ozturk attorney Mahsa Khanbani said she was targeted for her pro-Palestinian views expressed in the student newspaper op-ed.
Trump administration prosecutors charge without evidence that Ozturk supported Hamas.
Before Ozturk’s release was ordered, her defense lawyers said she has not been charged with any crime and maintained that her detention violated constitutional free speech and due process rights.
President Donald Trump said May 4 during an NBC News interview he was not sure immigrants are entitled to due process rights.
Asked to respond to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s comment that every person in the United States is entitled to due process, Trump replied, “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.”