US immigration judge denies bail to detained Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk

A Tufts University graduate student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last month in Somerville, Massachusetts, was denied bail by an immigration court in the state of Louisiana.

According to a petition filed on Wednesday in Vermont by her legal team, the immigration denied bail based on the “untenable conclusion” that Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk was “both a flight risk and a danger to the community”.

In the submission, Ozturk’s legal team urged the federal US District judge in Vermont to order that 30-year-old Ozturk be released or at least returned to Vermont by 18 April, following the immigration court ruling.

Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, was pursuing her PhD in child and human development at Tufts before the Trump administration targeted her for deportation for co-authoring an opinion article in the Tufts Daily student newspaper.

Ozturk was detained by masked plainclothes ICE agents on the street in Somerville on 25 March before being taken to an ICE detention centre in Basile, Louisiana. 

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The petition also said that Ozturk has suffered six asthma attacks since being apprehended by ICE.

Ozturk was represented in immigration court by two attorneys, including Marty Rosenbluth.

“Yesterday was a complete violation of due process and the rule of law. The immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration's attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights,” Rosenbluth said in reaction to the decision. 

“The government’s entire case against Rümeysa is based on the same one-paragraph memo from the State Department to ICE that just points back to Rümeysa’s op-ed,” Rosenbluth said in a press release issued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont. 

Naz Ahmad, co-director of CLEAR, a non-profit and clinic at the Cuny School of Law, is representing Ozturk in federal court, and said that most of Ozturk’s legal team were prevented from attending the immigration hearing.

“The hearing, which most of Ms Ozturk’s legal team were prevented from observing, and its result, were a shocking outlier even in a system well-known for providing a shoddy form of due process,” Ahmad said. 

Journalists were also barred from attending the immigration court hearing.

Crackdown

Ozturk has not been charged with any crime.

President Donald Trump has pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protesters and has accused them of antisemitism, supporting Hamas, and being a threat to national security.

Friends of Ozturk believe she may have been targeted because of a doxxing campaign for co-authoring the March 2024 opinion article in her university newspaper.

The article renewed calls for the university to adopt the "Tufts Community Senate Resolutions", to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.

Ozturk’s photo and other identifying information were posted on Canary Mission in February. Canary Mission is a website that documents individuals and organisations it considers to be "antisemitic".

Critics say the website's mission is to "demonise" and "dox" pro-Palestinian students and suppress criticism of Israel. 

Columbia alumni Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia students Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung have also been targeted for deportation by the current administration for pro-Palestine advocacy.

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