BOSTON/NEWARK: A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s conflict in Gaza and was detained by US immigration officials this week.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken into custody by US immigration authorities near her Massachusetts home on Tuesday, according to a video showing the arrest by masked federal agents. US officials revoked her visa.

The US Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the US government categorises as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.

Oncu Keceli, a spokesperson for Turkiye’s foreign ministry, said efforts to secure Ozturk’s release continued, adding consular and legal support was being provided by Turkish diplomatic missions in the US “Our Houston Consul General visited our citizen in the centre where she is being held in Louisiana on March 28. Our citizen’s requests and demands have been forwarded to local authorities and her lawyer,” Keceli said in a post on X.

Trump’s lawyers try to get activist Khalil’s case shifted to Louisiana

Ozturk’s arrest came a year after she co-authored an opinion piece in Tufts’ student newspaper criticising the university’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.

A lawyer soon after sued to secure her release, and on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union joined her legal defence team, filing a revised lawsuit saying her detention violates her rights to free speech and due process. Despite a Tuesday night order requiring the PhD student and Fulbright Scholar not to be moved out of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice, she is now in Louisiana.

In Friday’s order, US District Judge Denise Casper in Boston said that to provide time to resolve whether her court retained jurisdiction over the case, she was barring Ozturk’s deportation temporarily. She ordered the Trump administration to respond to Ozturk’s complaint by Tuesday.

Khalil’s case transfer

US government lawyers have pushed on Friday for the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian protest leader slated for deportation, to be moved to a Louisiana court thought to be sympathetic to President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown.

Columbia University graduate student Khalil — a prominent face of the protest movement that erupted in response to Israel’s campaign — was arrested and taken to Louisiana earlier this month, sparking protests.

Several other foreign student protesters have been similarly targeted. The government has not accused Khalil of any crime, but instead ordered his deportation and cancelled his resident’s permit, alleging he was undermining US foreign policy.

At a hearing in New Jersey, government lawyer August Flentje said that “for jurisdictional certainty, the case belongs in Louisiana.”

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2025