{"id":339806,"date":"2025-12-09T22:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/339806\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T22:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:25:09","slug":"tufts-student-detained-for-6-weeks-over-op-ed-can-now-teach-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/339806\/","title":{"rendered":"Tufts student detained for 6 weeks over op-ed can now teach again"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOSTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge has allowed a Tufts University student from Turkey to resume research and teaching while she deals with the consequences of having her visa revoked by the Trump administration, leading to six weeks of detention.<\/p>\n

The arrest of R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk<\/a>, a PhD student studying children\u2019s relationship to social media, was among the first as the Trump administration began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy. She had co-authored an op-ed criticizing her university\u2019s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. Caught on video<\/a> in March outside her Somerville residence, immigration enforcement officers took her away in an unmarked vehicle.<\/p>\n

\u00d6zt\u00fcrk has been out of a Louisiana immigrant detention center<\/a> since May and back on the Tufts campus. But she\u2019s been unable to teach or participate in research as part of her studies because of the termination of her record in the government\u2019s database of foreign students studying temporarily in the U.S.<\/p>\n

In her ruling Monday, Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that \u00d6zt\u00fcrk is likely to succeed on claims that the termination was \u201carbitrary and capricious, contrary to law and in violation of the First Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Government argued that termination was legal<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s lawyers unsuccessfully argued that the Boston federal court lacked jurisdiction and that \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System record (SEVIS) record was terminated legally after her visa was revoked, making her eligible for removal proceedings. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no statute or regulation that\u2019s been violated by the termination of the SEVIS record in this case,\u201d Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter said during a hearing last week. The Associated Press sent an email Tuesday seeking comment from Sauter on whether the government plans to appeal.<\/p>\n

In a statement, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, who plans to graduate next year, said while she is grateful for the court\u2019s decision, she feels \u201ca great deal of grief\u201d for the education she has been \u201carbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI hope one day we can create a world where everyone uses education to learn, connect, civically engage and benefit others \u2014 rather than criminalize and punish those whose opinions differ from our own,\u201d said \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, who is still challenging her arrest and detention.<\/p>\n

The then-30-year-old was one of four students who wrote the opinion piece in the campus newspaper. It criticized the university\u2019s response to student activists demanding that Tufts \u201cacknowledge the Palestinian genocide,\u201d disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.<\/p>\n

\u00d6zt\u00fcrk, who is Muslim, was meeting friends in March for iftar, a meal that breaks a fast at sunset during Ramadan<\/a>, according to her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said. The government asserted that terminating her SEVIS record two hours after her arrest was a proper way of informing Tufts University about her visa revocation.<\/p>\n

A State Department memo said \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions \u201c\u2018may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization\u2019 including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00d6zt\u00fcrk running out of time to pursue teaching, research goals<\/p>\n

Without her SEVIS status reinstated, \u00d6zt\u00fcrk said she couldn\u2019t qualify as a paid research assistant and couldn\u2019t fully reintegrate into academic life at Tufts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a strange kind of legal gaslighting here, where the government claims it\u2019s just a tinkering in a database, but this is really something that has a daily impact on Ms. \u00d6zt\u00fcrk\u2019s life,\u201d her attorney, Adriana Lafaille of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in court.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are running out of time to make this right. Each day that goes by is a day that she is being prevented from doing the work that she loves in the graduate program that she came here to be part of. Each day that this happens is a day that the government is allowed to continue to punish her for her protected speech.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u00d6zt\u00fcrk, meanwhile, has maintained a full course load and fulfilled all requirements to maintain her lawful student status, which the government hasn\u2019t terminated, her lawyer said. <\/p>\n

Record created to collect information on international students<\/p>\n

SEVIS is mandated by Congress in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and administered by the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement \u201cto collect information relating to nonimmigrant foreign students\u201d and \u201cuse such information to carry out the enforcement functions of\u201d ICE. <\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, when a SEVIS record is terminated, a student loses all on and\/ or off-campus employment authorization and allows ICE agents to investigate to \u201cconfirm the departure of the student.\u201d<\/p>\n

__<\/p>\n

McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge has allowed a Tufts University student from Turkey to resume research and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[170807,23,8731,23276,2302,170806,12,526,5619,793,790,803,10817,2221,152186,6098,170808,2001,3,111,12807,6148,795,21,792,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-339806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-adriana-lafaille","tag-america","tag-boston","tag-colleges-and-universities","tag-courts","tag-denise-j-casper","tag-donald-trump","tag-education","tag-gaza-strip","tag-general-news","tag-immigration","tag-israel","tag-israel-hamas-war","tag-legal-proceedings","tag-local-news-for-apple","tag-louisiana","tag-mark-sauter","tag-massachusetts","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-turkey","tag-u-s-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","tag-u-s-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-government","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}