(Corrects president who appointed judge in paragraph 17)
By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) - A Tufts University student from Turkey who was held for over six weeks in an immigration detention center in Louisiana after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza was released from custody on Friday after a federal judge granted her bail.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington (NYSE:BURL), Vermont, ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
The judge said Ozturk, whose arrest in Massachusetts in March was captured in a viral video, had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was "simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights."
"Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens," Sessions said. "Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center."
Ozturk, who appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, could be seen hugging one of her attorneys after the judge ordered her release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody.
She was released hours later, her legal team said. The judge will take up arguments in her underlying lawsuit at a later hearing.
"We are so relieved that Rumeysa will soon be back in Massachusetts, and won’t stop fighting until she is free for good," Jessie Rossman, a lawyer for Ozturk at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in a statement.
Massachusetts-based Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ozturk housing upon her release. In a statement, a university spokesperson said it hoped she would be able to rejoin its community as soon as possible to resume her doctoral studies.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the judge’s ruling another sign of what he considers a "judicial coup" in the United States. Several parts of the president’s hardline immigration agenda have been blocked by judges.
"We cannot individually litigate every single visa that we want to revoke," Miller told reporters.
The judge ruled shortly after a federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to re-detain Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian campus activist who a different judge in Vermont ordered released last week after immigration authorities arrested him as well.
’SIGNIFICANT CONSTITUTIONAL CONCERNS’
Ozturk was arrested on March 25 by masked, plainclothes officers on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.
The sole basis authorities have provided for revoking her visa was an opinion piece she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide."
Her lawyers at the ACLU argue that her arrest and detention were unlawfully designed to punish her for speech protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and to chill the speech of others.
The PhD student and Fulbright scholar was moved to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana, even though her lawyer filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts the day she was arrested and a judge there barred her from being moved out of the state without 48 hours’ notice.
By the time that order came down, ICE had already taken her to Vermont, where she was held briefly before being flown to Louisiana. A judge in Massachusetts subsequently transferred her case to Vermont, saying it could be properly heard there.
Sessions, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, then ordered that Ozturk be moved to Vermont so she could be available while he considered her "significant constitutional concerns."
A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered her transferred back to Vermont by May 14, but Sessions opted to proceed with a previously-scheduled bail hearing on Friday and allow Ozturk to appear remotely after her lawyers said she was suffering from worsening asthma attacks while in custody.
She suffered one such asthma attack in the middle of Friday’s hearing. She told the judge she had suffered about a dozen while in custody, more than at any time in the last two years, which she blamed on the "challenging" conditions of her confinement in an overly-packed space with poor air ventilation.
"The duration and frequency have increased because of both the constant triggers surrounding me and also the stressful environment that I am living in right now," Ozturk said.
(This story has been corrected to clarify that Bill Clinton appointed the judge, not Barack Obama, in paragraph 17)