By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) – An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.
Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.
An immigration judge on January 29 concluded the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.
Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.
That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Ozturk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March 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 an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Ozturk said in a statement.
The immigration judge’s decision is not itself public, and the administration could challenge it before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice.
A spokesperson for DHS, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a statement said the decision reflected “judicial activism.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again,” the spokesperson said.
The arrest of Ozturk, a child development researcher, in the Boston suburb of Somerville, was captured in a viral video that turned her case into one of the highest-profile instances of the effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.
The former Fulbright scholar was held for 45 days in a detention facility in Louisiana until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had briefly been held, ordered her immediately released after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights.
A federal judge in Boston last month ruled that the administration had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities. The Justice Department on Monday moved to appeal that decision.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Stephen Coates and Sonali Paul)
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