Court Halts Tufts Student’s Immigration Transfer

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    A federal appeals court has put a temporary hold on a prior ruling that was set to transfer a Turkish Tufts University student, currently held in a Louisiana immigration detention center, back to New England. This pause allows the court time to deliberate on an urgent request submitted by the government.
    The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, situated in New York, declared on Monday that a panel of three judges would convene on May 6 to hear arguments in the legal proceedings involving Rumeysa Ozturk, who, as of Tuesday, has been detained for five weeks.
    Previously, a district judge in Vermont had instructed the 30-year-old doctoral student to be transported to Vermont by Thursday for hearings to assess the legality of her detention. According to Ozturk’s legal representation, her detention is in violation of her constitutional rights, particularly concerning free speech and due process.
    The U.S. Justice Department, challenging the Vermont court’s decision, contends that the immigration court located in Louisiana has authority over her case.
    Federal jurisdiction over immigration matters is heavily restricted by Congress, government lawyers clarified, arguing that the Vermont judge’s directive oversteps these boundaries significantly, causing undue harm to government operations.
    Ozturk’s legal team has expressed objection to the government’s emergency motion. They warned that in practice, this temporary halt could be extended into several months.
    The incident began on March 25, when immigration officials detained Ozturk as she was walking in a Boston suburb. She was then driven through New Hampshire and Vermont, culminating in her being flown to a detention facility in Basile, Louisiana.
    Ozturk had been part of a group of four students who authored an opinion piece in The Tufts Daily, a campus publication, last year. The article criticized the university’s handling of student activists who demanded that Tufts acknowledge and respond to issues such as the “Palestinian genocide,” transparency about its investments, and the severance of financial ties with companies associated with Israel.
    A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security indicated back in March that, based on unspecified evidence, investigations linked Ozturk to actions in support of Hamas, an organization designated as a terrorist group by the U.S.