A federal appeals court on Wednesday granted a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England for hearings to determine whether her rights were violated.
A judicial panel of the New York-based US second circuit court of appeals ruled in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk after lawyers representing her and the US justice department presented arguments at a hearing on Tuesday.
Öztürk has been detained in Louisiana for six weeks following an op-ed she cowrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.
The court ordered Öztürk to be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody in Vermont no later than 14 May.
A district court judge in Vermont had earlier ordered that the 30-year-old doctoral student be brought to the state for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Öztürk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.
The justice department, which appealed that ruling, said that an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over her case.
Immigration officials surrounded Öztürk as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb on 25 March and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana.
Öztürk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, the Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”, disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Öztürk’s lawyers say she has suffered from asthma attacks and received poor medical care while being detained.
“Rümeysa has suffered six weeks in crowded confinement without adequate access to medical care and in conditions that doctors say risk exacerbating her asthma attacks. Her detention – over an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper – is as cruel as it is unconstitutional,” Jessie Rossman, the legal director, ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Today, we moved one step closer to returning Rümeysa to her community and studies in Massachusetts.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
• The subheading of this article was amended on 8 May 2025 to reflect that Rümeysa Öztürk was detained for six weeks, as the body text stated, not two weeks.
