An immigration judge denied bond to Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, whom Department of Homeland Security agents snatched off the streets of a Boston suburb and arrested.
The 30-year-old was arrested on March 25 by plainclothes immigration officers, and she’s being held in a Louisiana immigration detention facility. Her arrest was captured in a viral video.
The college student’s lawyers say the arrest and revocation of her student visa was in retaliation for an op-ed she co-wrote in her student newspaper about the war in Gaza. In the article, she wrote about wanting the university to support a student government measure acknowledging “the Palestinian genocide.”
Her lawyers asked a federal judge in Vermont, where she was originally held, to release her.
“Ms. Öztürk has committed no crime and DHS has provided zero evidence in their case against her,” Mahsa Khanbabai, one of Öztürk’s attorneys, said Thursday in a statement.
Öztürk’s lawyers said the Louisiana judge denied her bond after homeland security attorneys called her a flight risk.
Court papers detail that the government attorneys presented one document to support their opposition to the bond: the State Department memo revoking her visa.
The memo stated that the Trump administration determined she “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization,’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”
Khanbabai said the government’s prosecution of her constitutes an attack on free speech. “The court yesterday relied on a previously submitted State Department memo that points to nothing that Ms. Öztürk said or did — other than her 2024 school newspaper op-ed — to falsely claim she is a danger to her community,” she said. “This attack on free speech is despicable, but we won’t be deterred.”
A DHS official reportedly told NBC News that “being granted a visa to live and study in the United States is a privilege not a right.”
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“The State Department makes specific determinations about visa revocations when an individual poses a threat to national security,” the official added.
Ozturk’s attorneys have continued pushing for her to be returned to Vermont and asked for a hearing to be held next week. The Vermont judge has not decided whether that is appropriate.
