Judge moves legal case of detained Turkish Tufts University student to Vermont

BOSTON AP A federal judge on Friday moved the circumstance of a detained Tufts University doctoral pupil to Vermont where the Turkish national was briefly held before being moved to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana Rumeysa Ozturk was taken by immigration authorities as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on March After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile Louisiana Ozturk is among several people with ties to American universities who attended demonstrations or publicly expressed promotion for Palestinians during the war in Gaza and who in recent months had visas revoked or been stopped from entering the U S Her lawyers filed a petition in Massachusetts seeking her release but Justice Department lawyers argued that Ozturk s petition was filed in the wrong state should be dismissed and that her affair should go before an immigration judge Ozturk s lawyers announced at the time they filed the petition they had no way of knowing where she was They also noted that it was filed while Ozturk was in a van within the control of Massachusetts-based ICE leaders making the Boston court the appropriate venue U S District Judge Denise Casper on Friday moved the scenario to Vermont where Ozturk was being held at the time the petition was filed Ozturk s lawyers have announced her detention violates her constitutional rights including free speech and due process They had sought the judge to order that she be at once returned to Massachusetts and disclosed from custody A Department of Homeland Precaution spokesperson explained last week without providing evidence that investigations ascertained that Ozturk engaged in exercises in encouragement of Hamas a U S -designated terrorist group She 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 pupil activists demanding that Tufts acknowledge the Palestinian genocide disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel On Thursday her lawyer issued a comment from Ozturk in which she described her graduate-level research working with children and youth and reported she would continue to stand up against injustice I believe the world is a more beautiful and peaceful place when we listen to each other and allow different perspectives to be in the room she wrote