Judge Orders Immediate Release of Fulbright Scholar Öztürk

Federal District Court Judge William K. Sessions III ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail from detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement immediately with no travel restrictions.

Öztürk participated in the bail hearing in Vermont virtually from the detention center in Louisiana where she has spent more than six weeks since her 25 March 2025 arrest. ICE had not yet complied with an appeals court order to return her to Vermont by a deadline of 14 May 2025. A few hours after the judge issued his order, she was released. She is still potentially subject to deportation but is free while her case progresses in court.

She is a Fulbright scholar from Turkey who is about 7 to 9 months from completing her PhD in child and adolescent media consumption at Tufts University. She was taken by federal agents in plain clothes and face masks on the street in what two videos showed as an abduction more than an arrest.

Her asthma has worsened in the Louisiana detention facility to which she was quickly transferred after arrest. She has been kept in an overcrowded mouse-infested cell with 23 other women and very little time outside the cell. While her asthma was being discussed in the hearing, she had to temporarily excuse herself from the video link due to an asthma attack.

Sessions declared her detention appeared to be entirely in retaliation for an op-ed she wrote for a campus newspaper, in which she criticized Tufts’ response to war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Sessions said:

I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here.

The court finds that Ms. Öztürk has raised a substantial claim of a constitutional violation.

Immigration officials wanted to set conditions to constrain her freedom. Sessions rejected that. He called Öztürk’s experience “a traumatic incident” and said “her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”

Sessions scheduled to hear arguments later this month in his Vermont courtroom about constitutional matters in this case.

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