A federal judge in Burlington, Vermont, suggested Monday that he will likely weigh in on a legal challenge to the detention and transfer of a Tufts University student by immigration agents, and may order that she be brought to Vermont for a May hearing.
The matter before Judge William K. Sessions III concerns the Vermont federal court’s jurisdiction in a legal challenge to last month’s arrest of Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk. She was picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents near her home in Massachusetts and is now being held at a Louisiana detention center.
Immigration proceedings to deport Öztürk are separate from this case, and remain ongoing regardless of how Sessions rules.
The doctoral student was arrested by six plainclothes immigration officers in Somerville early on the evening of March 25. They drove her in shackles to New Hampshire, then to Vermont, and ultimately flew her to Louisiana, where she has since suffered four asthma attacks at a detention center she’s described in a sworn statement as “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.”
Öztürk’s attorneys say she was unlawfully detained in retaliation for an op-ed she co-authored last year in the Tufts Daily student newspaper, calling for the school to divest from companies with financial ties to Israel. The lawyers argue the government has violated Öztürk’s constitutional free speech and due-process rights; they asked the court to order her release or transfer her to detention in Vermont.
They’ve described her secret transfer to Louisiana — which happened over less than 24 hours, without letting her call her lawyer — as a game of “hopscotch with Rümeysa’s freedom.”
Attorneys for the federal government have said her arrest and detention followed standard procedure and that she was transferred due to a lack of beds for women in New England detention centers — an assertion disputed by immigration lawyers in the region.
Attorneys for the federal government argued Monday that the Vermont court doesn’t have jurisdiction in the case because Öztürk’s removal proceedings are ongoing and because there are limits to judicial authority over the executive branch when it comes to immigration proceedings. They’ve said any petitions for Öztürk’s release from detention should go before an immigration judge.
The case was transferred to Vermont on April 4 after a federal judge in Boston ruled it was the proper venue given that, according to the government’s timeline, Öztürk would have physically been in Vermont at the time her attorney first filed the legal challenge. However, Judge Denise Casper left open the possibility in her ruling that a Vermont judge may disagree.
On Monday in Vermont, the judge spent much of the hearing’s first hour questioning the government’s attorney on the jurisdiction arguments.
“I appreciate the fact that it becomes a little bit fuzzy when you’re talking about detention and its impact on the removal proceeding,” Sessions said. “But what is really, fundamentally, a question for me is: What if she’s right? What if there was a constitutional violation in her arrest?”
Sessions went on to ask whether the government would comply with a release order or whether it would cite an immigration detention order as reason to continue holding her: “Then we’re in a constitutional crisis,” he said.
The government attorney replied, “I don’t want to be perceived in any way of suggesting that we’re not going to abide by an order of the court.”
Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the federal court in Burlington Monday in support of Öztürk. Some drove up from Massachusetts, and others came from the tiny town of Glover, Vermont, carrying puppets of large white birds.
A rabbi of a Burlington congregation stood near protestors clad in keffiyehs, carrying Palestinian flags. Students from the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College were also there, alongside community members who have been protesting together for decades, who call themselves the “resistor sisters.”
“I’m here because I’m really worried — terrified really — of authoritarianism,” said Sarah Goodrich, of St. George, Vermont. “I feel like it’s here. And I’m here to fight for democracy. What’s happening to Rümeysa is totally unjust, and I want to see her free.”
In court, Sessions later in the hearing questioned Öztürk’s attorneys on whether a bail hearing — where questions of dangerousness and flight risk are assessed — should take place before any decision ordering her release.
“My fear is that … the government hasn’t had the opportunity to really address the dangerousness question,” Sessions said.
The Department of Homeland Security has said Öztürk engaged in activities “in support of Hamas,” but has not provided evidence for that claim.
Öztürk’s attorneys brought up a set of undisclosed State Department memos reported on Sunday by The Washington Post. In one, an office within the department determined there was no evidence to support the allegation that Öztürk had engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization.
A DHS memo sent to the State Department before her detention, cited by the Post, recommended the revocation of her visa on grounds that her presence or activities has “adverse policy consequence for the United States.”
“Öztürk engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023,” the memo said. The State Department later revoked Öztürk’s visa on March 21, according to court filings.
The language is almost identical to that found in a profile of Öztürk listed by Canary Mission, an anonymously run website that compiles personal information on students, professors and others it accuses of being anti-Israel or antisemitic. She’s one of 188 people on the list from Massachusetts.
That profile links to the op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts newspaper.
Jessie Rossman, an attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters after the hearing that the idea of moving someone being detained from state to state is “extraordinarily unusual.”
“What happened to Rümeysa is not ordinary immigration enforcement,” she said. “This is part of a policy of punishing people because of their protected speech.”
Both the president of Tufts University and a coalition of 27 Jewish organizations from across the country have filed statements in court in defense of Öztürk’s right to express her views.
“To watch state authorities undermine the same fundamental rights that empowered so many Jewish Americans is chilling; to know it is being done in the name of the Jewish people is profoundly disturbing,” the Jewish groups wrote in a brief, which supported Öztürk’s release or return to Vermont.
Brett Stokes, an attorney with Vermont Law and Graduate School, in an interview, said this case “deviates pretty drastically from what is typical.”
Stokes often represents immigrants who are detained in Vermont and said he doesn’t know of other cases where the St. Albans ICE facility has been used to hold people after processing. He said typically, detainees are moved to an ICE facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts, or held at a state Department of Corrections facility.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
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