By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to immediately release a Tufts University student from Turkey who has been held for over six weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention facility after she co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, granted bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
The judge said Ozturk had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was “simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”
“Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said. “Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center.”
Following the hearing, Ozturk, who appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, could be seen hugging one of her attorneys. Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ozturk housing upon her release.
The judge ruled shortly after a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to re-detain Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian campus activist who a different judge in Vermont ordered released last week after immigration authorities arrested him as well.
Ozturk’s arrest on March 25 by masked, plainclothes law enforcement officers on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home was captured in a viral video and occurred after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.
The sole basis authorities have provided for revoking her visa was an opinion piece she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
Her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that her arrest and detention were unlawfully designed to punish her for speech protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and to chill the speech of others.
The 30-year-old PhD student and Fulbright scholar was moved to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana, even though her lawyer filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts the day she was arrested and a judge there barred her from being moved out of the state without 48 hours’ notice.
By the time that order came down, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had already taken her to Vermont, where she was held briefly before being flown to Louisiana.
Rather than dismiss her case as the administration wanted, a Massachusetts judge transferred the case to Vermont, saying it could be properly heard there.
Sessions, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, then ordered Ozturk transferred to Vermont so she could be available as he weighed ordering her release and considered the “significant constitutional concerns” she had raised.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered her transferred to Vermont by May 14, but Sessions opted to proceed with a previously-scheduled bail hearing to go forward on Friday and allow Ozturk to appear remotely after her lawyers said she was suffering from worsening asthma attacks while in custody.
She suffered one such asthma attack in the middle of Friday’s hearing. She told the judge she had suffered about a dozen while in custody, more than at any time in the last two years, which she blamed on the “challenging” conditions of her confinement in an overly-packed space with poor air ventilation.
“The duration and frequency have increased because of both the constant triggers surrounding me and also the stressful environment that I am living in right now,” she said.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Bario, Bill Berkrot and Deepa Babington)
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