SOMERVILLE, Mass. — A federal immigration court on Wednesday denied bond to Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey who was arrested by ICE agents in Somerville in March and rushed away to a detention facility in Louisiana.
Department of Homeland Security lawyers argued in immigration court that Ozturk, 30, is “both a flight risk and a danger to the community,” a new filing by her legal team showed.
Her lawyers had asked the immigration judge to release her on bond as the case proceeds, but according to the filing, their bid was turned away after the government “presented only a single document in support of their opposition to Ms. Ozturk’s request.”
In an arrest caught on camera, Ozturk was surrounded by a group of masked federal agents in plain clothes as she walked along a street near her off-campus apartment on March 25.
Ozturk, a PhD student in Tufts’ Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was handcuffed and quickly whisked away.
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In less than 24 hours, she was transported from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont, then down to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana, where she’s been jailed for more than three weeks.
Federal authorities have alleged that Ozturk engaged in activities supporting the terrorist group Hamas and revoked her visa.
Ozturk’s lawyer Marty Rosenbluth argued that she hasn’t been accused of any crime and that the Trump administration targeted her for arrest, detention, and deportation in retaliation for an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper.
Rosenbluth said the federal judge denied his client’s bond based on an “untenable conclusion.”
“Yesterday was a complete violation of due process and the rule of law. The immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration’s attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights,” Rosenbluth said in a statement. “The government’s entire case against Rumeysa is based on the same one-paragraph memo from the State Department to ICE that just points back to Rumeysa’s op-ed.”
In a court filing earlier this month, Ozturk said she is one of 24 people in a cell that has a sign stating a capacity for 14.
“When they do the inmate count, we are threatened to not leave our beds or we will lose privileges, which means that we are often stuck waiting in our beds for hours,” she said. “At mealtimes, there is so much anxiety because there is no schedule when it comes. … They threaten to close the door if we don’t leave the room in time, meaning we won’t get a meal.”
Ozturk has said she wants to go back to Tufts so she can finish her degree, which she has been working on for five years.
Earlier this month, a Vermont judge ordered that Ozturk not be deported until he can rule on her case. Her lawyers want her case moved to Vermont from Louisiana.
Ozturk is among several people with ties to American universities whose visas were revoked or have been stopped from entering the U.S. after they were accused of attending demonstrations or publicly expressing support for Palestinians.
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