By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, April 17 (Reuters) – A Tufts University graduate who had been arrested by U.S. immigration agents last year as part of the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists has returned to her home in Turkey following a settlement with the government.
Lawyers for Rumeysa Ozturk announced the accord on Friday, a week after President Donald Trump’s administration fired an immigration judge who had in January rejected the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to deport her.
The administration had been appealing that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, and awaiting a ruling by a federal appeals court in its bid to overturn a judge’s decision that led to Ozturk’s release from immigration custody in May 2025.
Friday’s settlement resolved all of the legal proceedings and allowed Ozturk to return to Turkey unhindered after completing her PhD program in child study and human development in February, her attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union said.
“I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States – all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights,” Ozturk said in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
The former Fulbright scholar’s case was a high-profile example of an effort by the Trump administration to detain and deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.
She was held for 45 days in a Louisiana facility after immigration authorities in March 2025 arrested her on a street in Massachusetts after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.
The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was the editorial she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The ACLU said the government in Friday’s settlement acknowledged Ozturk always had lawful status while in the United States.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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