A federal judge in Boston has ordered the Trump administration to restore a record the government previously wiped so that Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student who was detained in Vermont and other states by immigration agents earlier this year, can take on paid research jobs as part of her studies.
The Tufts University Ph.D. student was first arrested in March by masked federal agents on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She was whisked north and held overnight at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in St. Albans, before being transferred via Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. The federal government has not charged Öztürk with a crime related to its case against her.
ICE officials have said they took Öztürk to Vermont because it was the closest facility they had available to detain her at the time. Her lawyers have contended, however, that the move was an effort to muddy the waters over which state her detention could be legally challenged in.
ICE held Öztürk in Louisiana for 45 days until a Vermont federal judge ordered her release on bail.
Just hours after the government arrested Öztürk in March, it also terminated her record in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, according to court records. ICE uses the system to track international students who live in the U.S.
According to court filings, without that record, Öztürk has been unable to participate in a paid research assistantship under her academic advisor that both she, and the advisor, say would be a substantial benefit to her studies and her career. Öztürk is studying child development and the impact of media on children’s well-being.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper granted Öztürk’s request for a preliminary injunction ordering the government to restore her SEVIS record. In Casper’s decision, the judge determined Öztürk would face “irreparable harm” from a continued inability to take on new research opportunities, including financial losses.
The Trump administration had argued in court filings that a federal district court judge had no authority to weigh in on its decision to terminate Öztürk’s SEVIS record.
Öztürk, in a statement provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been part of the legal team representing her in court, said she was grateful for the court’s decision though felt “a great deal of grief for all the educational rights I have been arbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies.”
“Nonetheless,” she added, “this decision gives me hope, and I earnestly hope that no one else experiences the injustices I have suffered.”
Öztürk appears to have been targeted by the Trump administration for an op-ed she co-wrote in Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. The Trump administration has said it arrested her in Somerville following a decision to revoke her student visa, though her attorneys say she got no notice of that decision until after being taken into custody. The government has not challenged her lawyers’ assertion that she was targeted in the first place over the newspaper article.
Öztürk has since been challenging the legal merits of her arrest and her subsequent detention in federal court, in large part on grounds that it violated the First Amendment. In May, a federal judge in Burlington ruled that Öztürk should not be kept in custody while that legal challenge is being considered, so she was released. The judge found that Öztürk’s right to free speech was being chilled by her ongoing detention and that ICE was not giving her adequate care for her asthma while detaining her.
At the same time, because her visa was revoked, Öztürk is facing the possibility of being deported. She is challenging those removal proceedings, but that is taking place in the federal immigration court system, which is separate from the U.S. district courts where judges are considering her challenge to the legal merits of her detention.
