'Immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration's attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights,' says Marty Rosenbluth
By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON (AA) - An immigration court's decision to deny detained Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk's release on bond represents a "complete violation of due process and the rule of law," her attorneys said Thursday.
Wednesday's hearing in the Southern state of Louisiana was closed to the press, but her attorneys issued a statement saying that a judge had denied bond for the former Fulbright scholar and current Tufts University PhD student.
"The immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration's attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights,” attorney Marty Rosenbluth said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing Ozturk in federal court in Vermont.
"The government's entire case against Rümeysa is based on the same one-paragraph memo from the State Department to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that just points back to Rumeysa's op-ed,” added Rosenbluth, referring to a piece she wrote for the student newspaper.
On Monday, a US federal judge in the state of Vermont said he is weighing whether to release Ozturk and hold a hearing in May as she challenges her detention.
Ozturk, a PhD student in child and human development at Tufts, was detained by masked US ICE agents outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. She was then taken to the state of Louisiana, thousands of kilometers (miles) away.
Her detention followed online targeting by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which took aim at her for co-authoring a March 2024 op-ed in The Tufts Daily student newspaper criticizing the university's response to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 51,000 Palestinians.
Mahsa Khanbabai, who is also representing Ozturk in immigration court, said the Trump administration's sole reliance on Ozturk's op-ed as the basis for her deportation is an attack on free speech rights, which are enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
"Ms. Ozturk has committed no crime and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has provided zero evidence in their case against her. Despite that, 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," Khanbabai said.
"This attack on free speech is despicable, but we won't be deterred. We will keep fighting until Ms. Ozturk is safely returned home to Massachusetts," she added.
Ozturk's attorneys urged the federal judge in Vermont to order her transferred to the Northeastern US state by April 18 "in light of the immigration court developments and ongoing risks to her health."
That follows the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruling April 4 that Ozturk's case should be transferred to Vermont.
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