A US 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 criticising her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, granted bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the centre of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican US 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 centre.”
Following the hearing, Ozturk, who appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, could be seen hugging one of her lawyers Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ozturk housing upon her release.
