A federal judge has said she was "struggling" to understand why the Trump administration is continuing to block a Tufts University PhD student from working on campus nearly seven months after she was released from an immigration detention centre.
Chief US District Judge Denise Casper questioned whether US Immigration and Customs Enforcement acted arbitrarily when it terminated Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk’s record in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) on the same day she was arrested in March.
The move followed the State Department’s decision to revoke her student visa.
Ozturk’s visa was cancelled after she co-wrote an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper criticising the university’s response to Israel’s carnage in Gaza and calling on it to acknowledge "the Palestinian genocide."
"What’s the rationale for allowing the agency to have the discretion to terminate the record?" Casper asked during the hearing in Boston.
Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, was arrested by masked, plainclothes agents in Somerville, Massachusetts, and held for 45 days in a Louisiana detention facility.
A federal judge in Vermont later ordered her immediate release, finding she had raised a substantial claim that her detention amounted to unlawful retaliation for protected political speech under the First Amendment.
Freed yet restricted
After her release, she was able to resume her studies at Tufts.
But the failure to reinstate her SEVIS record has prevented her from teaching or working as a research assistant — roles central to her academic progress in the final months before graduation, said Adriana Lafaille, her lawyer at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
She urged the court to order ICE to restore the record, arguing that the revocation of Ozturk’s visa governed only her entry into the United States and did not void her lawful student status.
Assistant US Attorney Mark Sauter said ICE has the discretion to update SEVIS when a student’s visa is cancelled and removal proceedings are pending.
Lafaille argued that the government had offered shifting explanations for its actions, contrasting them with the administration’s reversal in April of SEVIS terminations affecting thousands of other foreign students.
"This was one of several retaliatory actions the government took against Ms Ozturk for her protected speech," she said.
