A federal court has paused the transfer of detained Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana to a facility in Vermont.
Judge William K. Sessions III, sitting in federal court in Burlington, had issued a ruling earlier this month for Öztürk, who is Turkish and was in the United States on a student visa, to be transferred back to a Vermont facility by May 1 ahead of a later bail hearing.
However, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, in response to an emergency filing by the federal government, issued an order late Monday calling for a stay of Sessions’ transfer order. The court set a hearing for Tuesday, May 6 before a three-judge panel of the appeals court to consider the matter.
“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion,” the order issued Monday evening stated.
Öztürk, a doctoral student in child and human development, was taken into custody on a street near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked officers in plainclothes in late March.
She eventually was taken to Vermont and held overnight at a St. Albans immigration facility before being flown the next morning out of Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to Louisiana, where she’s been detained since.
Her attorneys have argued for her release, contending that she appears to have been wrongly targeted by federal immigration officers in violation of her free speech rights. They pointed to an op-ed Öztürk co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper last year that was critical of the university response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
