A Turkish graduate student at Tufts University who was detained by federal agents in Massachusetts last week and later taken to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in St. Albans will have her case transferred to federal court in Vermont, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper ordered on Friday.
ICE officials detained Rümeysa Öztürk at the agency’s field office in St. Albans the night of March 25, court records show. The next morning, officials took the 30-year-old to Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, where she was flown to Alexandria, Louisiana. She is currently held at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator.
Casper, the Massachusetts judge who initially ruled that Öztürk remain in that state, ordered on Friday that the federal government not transfer Öztürk out of the country. Since Öztürk was in Vermont when her attorney’s filed the case, the judge determined Vermont was the proper venue.
Still, Casper raised the possibility that a judge in Vermont might think otherwise.
“It will be for the District of Vermont to determine if it has jurisdiction” over Öztürk’s case, the judge wrote.
In a statement, Mahsa Khanbabai, an attorney for Öztürk, said, “Today’s ruling brings us one step closer to restoring Rümeysa Öztürk’s rights, and sends a clear message that the government cannot manipulate jurisdiction in order to target human rights defenders, in violation of their First Amendment rights.”
Öztürk’s attorneys have argued the student was unlawfully detained and should be released. At a Thursday hearing in Massachusetts, lawyers for the federal government argued Öztürk’s case should be transferred to Louisiana, according to CBS News.
The Vermont District Court’s online document database did not list Öztürk’s case as of Friday afternoon.
Attorneys representing Öztürk, who had been living in the U.S. on a student visa, have argued that she was wrongly targeted for exercising her rights to free speech. Last March, Öztürk co-wrote an op-ed for Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized university leaders for their response to demands that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that he had revoked Öztürk’s visa ahead of her sudden arrest because she participated in the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses last year. But the Associated Press has reported that, according to some of her friends and colleagues, Öztürk was not closely involved in the movement on Tufts’ campus.
Surveillance camera video of Öztürk’s arrest by plainclothes officers has since been widely published, and the incident has sparked large protests in the Boston area in recent days.
This week, after court documents revealed that federal authorities had transported Öztürk to Vermont, Gov. Phil Scott decried ICE’s actions, saying the country should be “ashamed.”
