A federal judge allowed a graduate student from Turkey to continue her challenge to her arrest by immigration officers on a Massachusetts street last month, rejecting the Trump administration’s attempts to dismiss the case.
Ruymesa Ozturk’s case gained national attention after video of her arrest went viral, sparking denunciations from immigrant rights groups and demonstrations at Tufts University, where she had been a student.
District Judge Denise Casper described the arrest in disapproving terms in her ruling.
She rejected the Justice Department’s request that the case be dismissed outright and also rejected an attempt to transfer the case to Louisiana, where Ms. Ozturk is being held.
Instead, the judge sent the case to the federal court in Vermont.
She also ordered the government not to deport Ms. Ozturk before the Vermont court rules.
She accused the administration of playing a sort of hide-the-immigrant from Ms. Ozturk’s lawyers, saying that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement waited a day before admitting that she had been transferred out of Massachusetts to New Hampshire then to Vermont and finally to Louisiana, where she remains detained.
Judge Casper said ICE had room for Ms. Ozturk’s detention in Maine when she was arrested, making the chain of events all the more suspicious.
“The irregularity of the arrest, detention and processing here is coupled with the failure to disclose Ozturk’s whereabouts even after the government was aware that she had counsel and the petition was filed in this court,” the judge wrote.
The judge said that since Ms. Ozturk had been in Vermont when the lawsuit was filed, that is the appropriate place for the case to go.
The administration has said Ms. Ozturk had her student visa revoked and she was arrested because of her pro-Palestinian activities.
The judge said the only evidence of that is her having signed onto an op-ed in the Tufts school newspaper last year criticizing the university for not taking a harder line on relations with Israel.
