- Rumeysa Ozturk ordered released immediately from Louisiana detention center
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Ozturk was detained after pro-Palestinian campus advocacy - Judge said her detention chills free speech of non-citizens
May 9 (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."