An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s bid to deport Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national whose high-profile arrest became a flashpoint in the crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism, her lawyers said.
In a Jan. 29 decision, Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston concluded the Department of Homeland Security failed to meet its burden to prove Ozturk was removable and terminated proceedings, according to a filing her attorneys made with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. The court had been reviewing an earlier ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.
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Ozturk, a child development researcher and former Fulbright scholar, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Boston suburb of Somerville last year, an arrest captured in viral video. She spent 45 days in a Louisiana detention facility before a federal judge in Vermont ordered her immediate release after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention amounted to unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights, her attorneys said.
Lawyers said the sole basis the government offered for revoking Ozturk’s visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. “Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Ozturk said in a statement.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called the judge’s decision “judicial activism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again,” the spokesperson said.
The immigration judge’s ruling is not public and could be challenged before the Board of Immigration Appeals. Separately, a federal judge in Boston last month ruled the administration had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting noncitizen scholars like Ozturk that chilled free speech on campuses; the Justice Department has moved to appeal that decision.
In another legal development, a federal judge blocked most of a California law that would have barred federal immigration agents from covering their faces during operations, while upholding a requirement that they display identification and badge numbers. U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder found the masking ban, known as the No Secret Police Act, unlawfully discriminated against federal officers because it did not apply to state law enforcement.
Snyder suggested the prohibition could be constitutional if broadened to include state officers. Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, a co-author of the measure, said Monday he would introduce amendments to extend the ban. “I will do everything in my power to expedite passage of this adjustment to the No Secret Police Act,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the administration to move forward, pending appeal, with ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain nationals of Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal. A lower court had vacated termination of TPS for those groups, but the appellate panel stayed that order, opening the door to deportations while the case proceeds.
TPS permits designated groups to live and work in the United States when returning home would be unsafe due to war, disaster or other extraordinary circumstances. The protections have applied to more than 51,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans who arrived after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and about 7,000 Nepalese following the 2015 earthquake. DHS has argued that conditions have improved sufficiently for return. Noem said this week that “TPS was never designed to be permanent.”
Taken together, the rulings underscore a volatile legal landscape around immigration enforcement, campus speech and federal-state friction — with courts delivering mixed outcomes as the administration accelerates removals and civil liberties groups press constitutional claims.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
