Judge Orders Tufts Student’s Detention Case Moved to Vermont

The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was detained by ICE agents in Massachusetts, driven to Vermont and flown to a detention center in Louisiana, where the government was trying to argue her court case.

A federal judge ordered Friday that the case to free Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student from Turkey, from immigration detention should be moved to a court in Vermont, denying a government demand to hold the proceedings in Louisiana, where she is being held.

Ms. Ozturk, a legal resident on a student visa, was swept up by the government as part of what the Trump administration has described as a campaign against antisemitic activists on campus.

In a hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the government had stealthily transferred her from Massachusetts, where she was arrested, to Louisiana without informing her lawyers where she was. The lawyer, Adriana Lafaille, suggested the government was seeking a court that would favor its case.

Louisiana has one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.

Government lawyers told the court that Ms. Ozturk had been moved to Louisiana because there was not an available bed for a female detainee in New England, and that there was no intent to withhold information about her location.

In her ruling on Friday, Judge Denise Casper of U.S. District Court in Boston, said that Vermont was the proper venue because Ms. Ozturk was being held there overnight at the time that her lawyers — not knowing where she was — filed a petition for her release in Boston.