Appeals court pauses Tufts student’s transfer to Vermont in immigration detention case

A federal appeals court has paused a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England this week so it can consider an emergency motion filed by the government.

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York, ruled Monday that a three-judge panel would hear arguments on May 6 in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk. She’s been detained for five weeks as of Tuesday.

A district court judge in Vermont had earlier ordered that the 30-year-old doctoral student be brought to the state by Thursday for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.

The U.S. Justice Department, which is appealing that ruling, said that an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over her case.

Congress limited federal-court jurisdiction over immigration matters, government lawyers wrote. Yet the Vermont judge’s order “defies those limits at every turn in a way that irreparably harms the government.”

Ozturk’s lawyers opposed the emergency motion. “In practice, that temporary pause could last many months,” they said in a news release.

Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana.

Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.