An immigration judge rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Tufts University PhD student Rumesa Ozturk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said Monday.
The arrest of child development researcher Rumesa Ozturk in the Boston suburb of Somerville was captured in a viral video that shocked many and drew criticism from civil rights groups. (File Photo/AP)Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, which was reviewing a ruling in May to release him from immigration custody.
An immigration judge on Jan. 29 concluded that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving he was deportable and dismissed the case against him, his lawyer wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union.
His immigration attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, said Boston immigration judge Rupal Patel issued the decision.
It ends, for now, proceedings that began with the arrest of Ozturk by immigration authorities on a Massachusetts street in March after the US State Department revoked his student visa.
Authorities’ sole basis for revoking his visa was an editorial he co-wrote in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier criticizing his school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the flaws in the justice system, my case can offer hope to those who have been wronged by the US government,” Ozturk said in a statement.
The immigration judge’s decision itself is not public, and the administration can challenge it before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice.
DHS, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to a request for comment.
The arrest of Ozturk, a child development researcher in the Boston suburb of Somerville, was captured on a viral video that shocked many and drew criticism from civil rights groups.
The former Fulbright scholar was held in a detention facility in Louisiana for 45 days until a federal judge in Vermont, where he was briefly held, ordered his immediate release after he raised a substantive claim that his detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of his right to free speech.
