By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A federal judge decided on Thursday not to wait for President Donald Trump’s administration to bring a Tufts University doctoral student being held in a Louisiana immigration detention facility back to Vermont as previously ordered before assessing whether she should be released from custody.
Burlington, Vermont-based U.S. District Judge William Sessions instead opted to let Rumeysa Ozturk appear remotely at a bail hearing on Friday. Ozturk, who is a citizen of Turkey, is at the center of what has become one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from the Republican president’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
Sessions had earlier ordered the administration to bring Ozturk to Vermont so she could appear in person for court hearings on her claims that she has been unlawfully detained for six weeks for engaging in pro-Palestinian campus advocacy.
Her lawyers have said she was arrested on March 25 by U.S. immigration authorities on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, after co-writing an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper that criticized the university’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
After Ozturk’s arrest, she was transferred to Vermont before being sent to the Louisiana detention facility where she is being held. Ozturk was located in Vermont at the time the lawsuit challenging her detention was filed.
After the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday gave the administration an extra week to move Ozturk to Vermont, her lawyers convinced Sessions to proceed with Friday’s bail hearing and allow her to instead appear remotely to speed along her release.
“She really shouldn’t be forced to undergo another week of detention,” Monica Allard, a lawyer for Ozturk at the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, said during a Thursday morning hearing.
Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher, arguing for the administration, contended that holding the bail hearing on Friday appeared to contradict the schedule that the 2nd Circuit had contemplated when it gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement until May 14 to transfer Ozturk to Vermont.
“It just seems to be in tension with the language in the circuit’s decision” on Wednesday, Drescher said.
Allard cited Ozturk’s health as a reason to move forward with a bail hearing even if she was not physically present. Ozturk’s lawyers have said she has suffered several asthma attacks while in custody that have become progressively more serious.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston)
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