A Louisiana immigration judge found Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was both a risk of flight and a danger to the community on Wednesday and refused to release her, according to a filing in Vermont federal district court from Wednesday night by her ACLU attorneys and made public Thursday.
Öztürk was arrested on March 25 in Somerville in apparent retaliation for co-authoring a 2024 opinion essay for the Tufts Daily student newspaper.
In the written filing, Öztürk’s attorneys expand on arguments they made at Monday’s hearing and ask Vermont federal district judge William Sessions III to bring her to Vermont by Friday so she can work with her lawyers to prepare for a bail hearing on Wednesday, “or at the soonest possible date thereafter that is convenient to the Court.” The judge had previously suggested a hearing in May.
Öztürk’s lawyers ask Sessions to order the government to produce documents referred to in Sunday’s Washington Post article that address reasons why Öztürk was detained. The government didn’t provide those documents in her immigration case, and said it shouldn’t have to, Öztürk’s lawyers say.
Öztürk’s attorneys decry the government’s “unsupported contention that Ms. Öztürk poses a flight risk,” and assail the immigration judge’s finding that Öztürk is dangerous, something that the government did not even argue at her hearing, they say.
“The immigration judge’s decision was based solely on the [Department of State] memorandum, which points to no conduct of Ms. Öztürk’s except her co-authorship of an op-ed that the … memo asserts had ’found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus,’” they write. “That document cannot support any serious, good-faith finding of flight risk or dangerousness, rendering it all the more clear that Ms. Öztürk relies entirely on this Court to obtain relief from her unlawful arrest and detention.”
“Yesterday was a complete violation of due process and the rule of law,” said Georgia immigration attorney Marty Rosenbluth, who is working on Öztürk’s Louisiana immigration case. “The immigration courts are cowering to the Trump administration’s attempts to silence advocates of Palestinian rights.”
This echoes an argument from Monday’s hearing in Vermont: that the immigration court’s bond process to release immigration detainees while their immigration cases go on is ineffective and therefore Öztürk’s only remedy is a release order from the Vermont federal judge.
Öztürk’s attorneys also raise medical concerns, saying that she has had an additional two asthma attacks since April 10, when she reported having four such attacks during her arrest, transport and subsequent detention. They ask for her to be evaluated by an independent doctor and say that she did not feel safe with the medical facility at her detention site in Louisiana, where nurses did not provide treatment for her ongoing asthma attacks.
At the same time as arguing for a bail hearing in Vermont, Öztürk’s lawyers also say that the court has enough information before it to order her release “on the current record.” They ask the court to order the government respond to her request for release by Monday.
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