Rümeysa Öztürk, Student Visa Holder Detained For Writing An Op-Ed, To Be Released On Bail

A district court judge ordered the Tufts Ph.D. student to be released on bail after more than six weeks in detention for merely writing an op-ed in her student newspaper.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a student visa holder at Tufts University from Turkey, was ordered to be released on bail and freed from over six weeks of detention in a Louisiana immigration detention center after Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped her of her visa and ordered her deported for co-authoring an op-ed in her student newspaper.

Judge William Sessions III in the U.S. District Court of Vermont ordered Öztürk released on bail Friday, saying that the government had not presented a legitimate case for her detention and that she faced significant danger of health issues while in detention due to her asthma.

“There is no evidence here as to the motivation [to detain and remove her] absent the consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said. Adding, “The reason she has been detained is simply and purely the expression she made in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”

Öztürk’s detention not only infringed on her own rights, but it also “chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said.

A fifth-year doctoral student, Öztürk was taken off the street of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes immigration officers wearing masks on March 25, after Rubio labeled her a threat to national security and revoked her student visa. What made her a threat, according to the government, was her co-authoring an opinion piece calling on the Tufts president to support a student vote to divest from Israeli companies amid Israel’s war in Gaza.