Updated at 6:49 p.m.
BURLINGTON — A federal judge in Vermont on Friday ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student who has spent the past six weeks in federal immigration custody — including, briefly, in St. Albans — be immediately released from detention.
U.S. District Court Judge William K. Sessions III’s ruling came at the end of a three-hour hearing at the federal courthouse in Burlington that saw Öztürk, who is in the final year of a doctoral program at Tufts University, take the stand remotely over video from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit and seated next to one of her attorneys in a room with plain, white walls.
It’s the second time in as many weeks that a federal judge in Vermont has released a foreign-born student who appears to have been targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration for voicing opinions related to the war between Israel and Hamas. The cases have drawn international attention and, in Vermont, repeatedly sparked large protests outside the Burlington courthouse against the administration’s actions.
With Friday’s ruling, Öztürk “can continue the life that she should be able to live,” said Jessie Rossman, one of the student’s lawyers, speaking to reporters shortly after the hearing. “She can come home. She can come back to her community.”
Öztürk was arrested by armed and masked federal agents on a street in Massachusetts in late March. She was whisked north to an ICE field office in St. Albans and held there overnight before being flown to Louisiana out of Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport. The government appears to have targeted her for an op-ed she co-wrote last year in Tufts’ student newspaper criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.
Trump administration officials have since revoked her student visa, and even after Sessions’ decision on Friday, she still faces the possibility of deportation in separate, ongoing proceedings in federal immigration court in Louisiana.
Ruling from the bench on Friday afternoon, Sessions appeared almost surprised that federal officials had not, he said, pointed to evidence other than the op-ed for why they arrested Öztürk in the first place, saying the student had raised a “very substantial” claim that her rights under the First Amendment had been violated.
In addition to violating her own rights, Sessions said, Öztürk’s detention also “chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in the country” who, like her, are not U.S. citizens.
The judge also said he was concerned that Öztürk’s health would suffer if she remained in ICE custody. The student testified earlier in the hearing that the asthma she has dealt with for years has taken a sharp turn for the worse in the weeks since her arrest.
She told the court that while she had only nine asthma attacks over a roughly two-year period leading up to her arrest in late March, she has had 16 such attacks in the roughly six weeks since then, and the attacks have increased in severity and length.
Jessica McCannon — a pulmonologist at Massachusetts General Hospital whom Öztürk’s legal team called to the stand — then told the court that, after reviewing the student’s medical records and speaking with her following her arrest, it was clear Öztürk’s asthma had “worsened significantly” since she was taken into custody.
Öztürk testified that she is granted limited time outside and is regularly exposed to the smell of cleaning agents and other scents that, combined with a crowded living space, she believes have exacerbated her condition while in ICE detention in Louisiana.
At one point during the hearing, Öztürk excused herself from the room where she was testifying, with one of her lawyers saying she was having another asthma attack.
Toward the end of Friday’s hearing, the prosecutor representing the government — Acting U.S. Attorney for Vermont Michael Drescher — made only brief arguments for why Öztürk should be kept in custody, and did not call any witnesses. The government has maintained that, in its view, Sessions lacks jurisdiction over the student’s case, which should instead be litigated entirely within the federal immigration system.
That argument fell flat earlier this week before another federal court. A panel of judges in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Vermont, rejected the government’s challenge to an earlier ruling Sessions had made ordering Öztürk to be transferred to a detention facility in Vermont. The appeals court found that Sessions was right in taking up the proceedings, ruling on Wednesday, just a day after it heard oral arguments.
Öztürk’s attorneys originally filed their challenge to her detention in Massachusetts, but a federal judge there later transferred the case to Vermont after the government said the student had in fact been moved to Vermont by the time the legal challenge was filed.
It wasn’t immediately clear Friday if the government would appeal Öztürk’s detention case further, though Drescher made a reference to “future litigation if appropriate.”
Öztürk told the court she was planning, if released, to return to Tufts’ campus to get back to her studies and that she would move into housing provided by the school. She has been hoping to finish her doctoral program by the end of the year, she said.
As a condition of her release, Sessions — granting a request by the student’s lawyers — directed an employee of Burlington’s city-run Community Justice Center to supervise her remotely and provide regular updates about her to the court. It’s also possible that ICE will impose additional monitoring on her while her immigration case continues, Sessions said, though he wasn’t immediately sure what that process would entail.
The judge also directed Drescher to let him know, as soon as Drescher got word from ICE, that Öztürk had, in fact, been released from the facility in Louisiana. Drescher replied that he would do so, after saying he had no indication the government would refuse to comply with the judge’s order.
