BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge has allowed a Tufts University student from Turkey to resume research and teaching while she faces the consequences of the Trump administration revoking her visa, which leads to six weeks of detention.
The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student who studies children’s relationship with social media, was among the first as the Trump administration began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy. She co-authored an op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. Filmed in March outside her Somerville residence, immigration officers took her away in an unmarked vehicle.
Öztürk has been out of an immigration detention center in Louisiana since May and returned to the Tufts campus. But she was unable to teach or participate in research as part of her studies because of the termination of her record in the government’s database of foreign students studying temporarily in the US.
In her ruling Monday, Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that Öztürk is likely to succeed based on claims that the termination was “arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law and in violation of the First Amendment.”
The government argued that the termination was legal
Government lawyers unsuccessfully argued that the federal court in Boston lacked jurisdiction and that Öztürk’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) registration was legally terminated after her visa was revoked, making her eligible for removal proceedings.
“There is no statute or regulation that was violated by terminating the SEVIS file in this case,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter said during a hearing last week. The Associated Press sent an email Tuesday seeking comment from Sauter on whether the government plans to appeal.
In a statement, Öztürk, who plans to graduate next year, said that while she was grateful for the court’s decision, she felt “great pain” for the education she was “arbitrarily denied as a scholar and as a woman in my last year of doctoral studies.”
“I hope that one day we can create a world where everyone uses education to learn, connect, engage civically and benefit others — rather than criminalize and punish those whose views differ from ours,” said Öztürk, who is still contesting her arrest and detention.
The then 30-year-old was one of four students who wrote the op-ed in the campus newspaper. He criticized the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Öztürk, who is Muslim, was meeting friends in March for iftar, a meal that breaks the fast at sunset during Ramadan, according to her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Her student visa had been revoked days earlier, but she had not been told about it, her lawyers said. The government asserted that canceling her SEVIS file two hours after her arrest was an appropriate way to notify Tufts University of the visa revocation.
A State Department memo said Öztürk’s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions “‘may undermine US foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization,’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”
Öztürk runs out of time to pursue teaching, research goals
Without her SEVIS status restored, Öztürk said she would not be able to qualify as a paid research assistant and fully reintegrate into academic life at Tufts.
“We have a strange kind of legal gaslighting here, where the government claims it’s just a change in a database, but this is really something that impacts Ms. Öztürk’s life on a daily basis,” her attorney, Adriana Lafaille of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, told the court.
“We’re running out of time to get this right. Every day that goes by is a day she’s prevented from doing the work she loves in the graduate program she came here to be a part of. Every day this happens is a day the government is allowed to continue punishing her for her protected speech.”
Meanwhile, Öztürk maintained a full course and met all the requirements to maintain her legal student status, which the government did not terminate, her lawyer said.
Record created to collect information about international students
SEVIS is mandated by Congress in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and is administered by the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement “to collect information relating to nonimmigrant alien students” and “to use such information to carry out the enforcement functions of” ICE.
According to the US Department of Homeland Security, when a SEVIS record is terminated, a student loses all on-campus and/or off-campus employment authorization and allows ICE agents to investigate to “confirm the student’s departure.”
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McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire.