Judge does not wait for Tufts University students detained by ICE to hold bail hearing
A federal judge in Vermont decided not to wait for a Tufts University student to move from the Louisiana Immigration Detention Center to schedule a bail hearing on Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested while walking along a street in a suburban Boston.
Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, is expected to appear at a hearing in Burlington.
Her attorney said her detention violated her constitutional rights, including freedom of speech and due process. They called on her to release.
The U.S. Department of Justice said Oztuk had a separate dismissal process for her case in the Louisiana immigration court.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions ordered Ozturk to move to Vermont, where she was last detained before she was taken to Louisiana. The government demanded delays, but the federal appeals court upheld his ruling Wednesday, ordering the transfer of Ozturk to ICE detention centers in Vermont no later than May 14.
The meeting decided not to wait for the transfer and continued the bail hearing.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk, Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before placing her in custody in Brazil, Louisiana. Her attorney said her student visa had been revoked a few days ago, but she was not informed of that.
Ozturk’s lawyers first filed a petition in Massachusetts on behalf of her, but they didn’t know where she was until she was detained for more than 24 hours. A Massachusetts judge then transferred the case to Vermont.
Ozturk, one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper The Tufts Daily, last year criticized the university’s response to student activists, demanded that Tufts “recognize the Palestinian genocide” and disclosed its investments and divested from companies linked to Israel.
The State Department memorandum said that after assessing her actions “maybe by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and expressed support for the hostile environment of designated terrorist organizations “could undermine U.S. foreign policy,” Ozturk’s visa was revoked and a designated terrorist organization was designated “and a designated terrorist organization” that included acts of common reasons with organizations that were later temporarily banned by campus. ”
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said in March that there was no evidence that the investigation found that Ozturk was engaged in activities in support of the US-designated terrorist group Hamas.
