A US federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore the SEVIS student-immigration database record of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, ruling that authorities likely acted unlawfully when they terminated her status.
Chief Judge Denise Casper of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction on Monday, concluding that Ozturk is "likely to succeed" on her claim that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s action was "arbitrary and capricious."
She directed officials to restore Ozturk's SEVIS record retroactive to March 25, the day masked ICE agents detained her in Somerville, Massachusetts.
SEVIS is a federal database administered by ICE and used to track foreign students.
Terminating a student’s record prevents them from working and jeopardises their legal presence in the country.
In a statement released through the American Civil Liberties Union, Ozturk said she was grateful for the decision.
"I earnestly hope that no one else experiences the injustices I have suffered," she said.
"I hope one day we can create a world where everyone uses education to learn, connect, civically engage and benefit others, rather than criminalise and punish those whose opinions differ from our own. While I am grateful for the court's decision, I still feel a great deal of grief for all the educational rights I have been arbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies."
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately comment.
Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD student in child development at Tufts University, was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents who surrounded her outside her home on March twenty-five.
Her student visa was subsequently revoked by the State Department and she was transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, where she spent six weeks before a federal judge in Vermont ordered her release on May nine, citing her asthma and the lack of justification for her continued detention.
Her detention followed online targeting by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission, which criticised her for co-authoring a March 2 2024, opinion piece in The Tufts Daily that condemned the university’s response to calls for divestment from companies linked to Israel and urged acknowledgement of a "Palestinian genocide."
The Trump administration has alleged that Ozturk engaged in activities supporting Hamas, but has not presented evidence to substantiate the claim.
She was among several international students swept up in the administration’s widening crackdown on pro-Palestine campus activists.
