On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration must transfer Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk from Louisiana to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Vermont.
Last month, U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III ordered Trump to transfer Ozturk to Vermont, but the administration appealed the ruling. The judicial panel of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals has now granted that order.
“The District of Vermont is likely the proper venue to adjudicate Öztürk’s habeas petition because, at the time she filed, she was physically in Vermont,” wrote the panel in its ruling. The panel said she will have to be moved by May 14.
“Rümeysa has suffered six weeks in crowded confinement without adequate access to medical care and in conditions that doctors say risk exacerbating her asthma attacks. Her detention — over an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper — is as cruel as it is unconstitutional,” said ACLU of Massachusetts legal director Jessie Rossman in a statement. “Today, we moved one step closer to returning Rümeysa to her community and studies in Massachusetts.”
Öztürk was kidnapped off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by six plain-clothed officers on March 25 and sent to Louisiana to face deportation. The Washington Post reported that the State Department found no evidence to justify her arrest, but proceeded with it anyway, invoking an Immigration and Nationality Act authority that doesn’t require “a rationale and explanation and evidence.”
Öztürk was targeted for co-writing an op-ed in Tufts’s student paper that called on the school to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza and cut its ties with Israel. The Trump administration has claimed that Öztürk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” but has offered no evidence to back this up.
Öztürk says she is one of 24 people in a cell meant for 14. She has suffered multiple asthma attacks since being detained and is not allowed access to the medication she needs.
“When they do the inmate count we are threatened to not leave our beds or we will lose privileges, which means that we are often stuck waiting in our beds for hours,” she said in a statement. “At mealtimes, there is so much anxiety because there is no schedule when it comes. … They threaten to close the door if we don’t leave the room in time, meaning we won’t get a meal.”
Last month, Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey and Massachusetts Representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley visited Öztürk at the detention facility and published a New York Times op-ed detailing what they saw.
“What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Öztürk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause,” wrote the lawmakers. “She was walking to an iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held.”
The Öztürk ruling is not the only legal setback that the Trump administration has encountered in recent days.
On Wednesday, District Court Judge Michael Farbiarz ordered the Trump administration to detail its legal arguments for deporting Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student and Palestine activist who was detained in March and is also being held in Louisiana.
Additionally, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles has ruled that Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri’s case will remain in Virginia and not be moved to Texas, where he is currently being detained.
In March, Khan Suri was arrested outside his Virginia home by masked federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed he was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” but offered no evidence.
Khan Suri’s attorneys say that ICE has transferred him across five different facilities across three states since he was detained and has kept his legal team in the dark about his whereabouts. Like Khalil and Öztürk, he is currently challenging the constitutionality of his arrest and detention in court.
“In this important ruling, the court has rightfully rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to spirit Dr. Khan Suri away from Virginia to manufacture jurisdiction in whatever court it pleases,” said Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Astha Sharma Pokharel in a statement. “We will now continue fighting for Dr. Khan Suri’s freedom — his freedom to be with his family in Virginia, to continue his studies and work at Georgetown, and to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.”
The entire Trump regime is a set-back!