Vermont federal judge orders Rümeysa Öztürk to be released from custody
May 09, 2025 | 1:32 pm ET
Description
Attorney Mahsa Khanbabai speaks with the media outside U.S. District Court in Burlington on Monday, April 14, 2025, after arguing for the release of Rumeysa Ozturk. Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University from Turkey, was detained and is facing deportation after co-authoring an op-ed on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
BURLINGTON — A federal judge in Vermont on Friday ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student who has spent weeks in federal immigration custody in Louisiana, be immediately released from detention.
U.S. District Court Judge William K. Sessions III’s decision came after he heard several hours of arguments in a Burlington courtroom both from attorneys representing Öztürk, who attends Tufts University, as well as a prosecutor representing President Donald Trump’s administration.
Öztürk was arrested by armed and masked agents in Massachusetts in late March and has been in federal custody since. The government appears to have targeted Öztürk solely for an op-ed she co-wrote last year in Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza.
Öztürk appeared remotely from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana at Friday’s court hearing. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit and seated in a room with blank, white walls. She was accompanied by one of her attorneys.
Michael Drescher, the acting U.S. attorney for Vermont, indicated to Sessions toward the end of Friday’s proceedings that the government would comply with the judge’s order.
Sessions then directed Drescher to let the court know as soon as Drescher got word from immigration authorities in Louisiana that Öztürk had, in fact, been released.
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Öztürk’s attorneys indicated that her plan was to return to Tufts to continue her studies and the teaching work she does as a graduate student.
“One of the dangers of what we are seeing in the government’s behavior in this case is the very strong message it sends to people who are watching that you can be punished by your speech,” Jessie Rossman, one of Öztürk’s lawyers, told reporters after the hearing. “And what we’ve heard from the court today was confirmation that that is not what we do in this country.”
While Friday’s ruling releases Öztürk from detention — where she has said her health, specifically her asthma, has deteriorated — she continues to face the possibility of deportation in federal immigration court proceedings, which are separate from the court in Vermont.
This story will be updated.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont federal judge orders Rümeysa Öztürk to be released from custody.
Montpelier, VT