In a court filing Wednesday, ACLU lawyers accuse Immigration and Customs Enforcement of a “deliberate and secretive hopscotch approach” to moving Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk from Somerville to Methuen to Lebanon, New Hampshire, to St. Albans, Vermont, to Burlington, Vermont, in the space of 12 hours in “an unlawful attempt to game the system” and prevent judicial review of her arrest.
Öztürk, who was legally in the country on a student visa and is not accused of any crime, was abducted by federal agents March 25 in Somerville, in apparent retaliation for an opinion essay she co-wrote in The Tufts Daily last March.
Judge Denise Casper set a 2 p.m. Thursday hearing on Öztürk’s request to be brought back to Massachusetts and released. The hearing is in federal court in Boston, and remote audio will be available with registration.
Hello from Remyüsa Öztürk’s habeas petition hearing before Judge Casper in Courtroom 11 at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston.
Courtroom is full, but the overflow assembly downstairs is not overly so.
Background thread: bsky.app/profile/john…
— John Hawkinson (@johnhawkinson.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Casper’s hearing, one day after Öztürk’s Wednesday filing, itself one day after the government’s Tuesday filing, represents an unusually expedited schedule for a federal court.
In Wednesday’s filings, Öztürk’s attorneys say the rapid movement of Öztürk across three states (and three federal court districts) is “highly unusual.”
Ice’s logistics and procedures “are not consistent with anything I have ever observed in my 17 years of immigration practice,” wrote Heather Yountz, an immigration attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute who provided a declaration attached to the filing.
“I have never seen or even heard of an immigrant booked in 14 minutes,” Yountz wrote. “I have never seen a client transferred twice in the same day. The fastest transfer I recall seeing was 24 hours after initial placement. I do not recall ever seeing a client arrested in Massachusetts be detained in St. Albans, Vermont. I have never seen an F-1 [student visa] revocation where the noncitizen was arrested and detained on the street, by masked men, with no prior notice that the visa had been revoked. To the best of my memory, in each of the F-1 revocations I have seen, the noncitizens’ alleged actions leading to the visa revocation would (if true) have been clearly in violation of the terms of the visa (e.g., the immigrant was no longer attending the listed school, the immigrant had overstayed the visa). I have never before seen an F-1 visa revoked, and the student arrested without prior notice of the revocation, based on an op-ed published in a school newspaper.”
Wednesday’s filing also takes issue with Ice’s contention, written Tuesday, that “there was no available bedspace” in New England for Öztürk. There “were at least 16 open beds” in Maine, according to the Maine School of Law’s Refugee and Human Rights Clinic, which monitors local immigration jails, her lawyers said.
Legal argument
The bulk of Öztürk’s filing is legal argument, a preview of what we can expect to hear at Thursday’s hearing.
The ACLU argues that Öztürk’s case is properly heard in Massachusetts federal district court, even though Öztürk was in Vermont at the time it was filed, because “it simply cannot be that the government may detain a person, keep their counsel, family and friends from knowing where they are being held, look on as that counsel timely files a habeas petition challenging their unlawful detention in the only place the detainee was known to be, move the detainee 1,000 miles away, and end up in the venue the government intended to manufacture all along.”
The filing cites Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurrence in Rumsfeld v. Padilla, in which he describes exceptions to the usual rule of filing in the district where a person is held: “If there is an indication that the government’s purpose in removing a prisoner were to make it difficult for his lawyer to know where the habeas petition should be filed, or where the government was not forthcoming with respect to the identity of the custodian and the place of detention.”
The ACLU says Ice did both things.
Öztürk’s lawyers say she should be released on bail because the “shocking circumstances” of her arrest and transport qualify as the “exceptional circumstances” required for release. They note she has had three asthma attacks since her arrest.
They also say that Patricia Hyde, the Ice New England field office director, was the proper target of the habeas petition, because “at the time the habeas petition on [Öztürk’s] behalf was filed, she was not in a facility with a superintendent, but in a vehicle being moved around between different locations in New England.”
The Department of Justice had argued that Hyde was the wrong respondent for the petition, but they didn’t suggest who else it might be.
Öztürk’s lawyers provide technical responses to complex immigration law arguments DOJ had made Tuesday about laws that channel review of immigration actions to the federal courts of appeals and strip jurisdiction from the federal district courts. They say those don’t apply because Öztürk isn’t challenging a “final order of removal”; because she isn’t challenging a “discretionary” decision to “commence proceedings, adjudicate cases or execute removal orders”; because she challenges the government’s retaliation for her First Amendment -protected free speech, not the government’s “discretionary judgment”; because she isn’t challenging the revocation of her student visa, but rather the targeting of “noncitizens for their protected political speech”; that even the Secretary of State’s “discretionary” decisions are reviewable if they “cloak unconstitutional or unlawful conduct under the guise of ‘discretion’ and thereby evade judicial review”; that the Administrative Procedure Act allows her to challenge the termination of her student status because ICE didn’t follow its regulation.
Casper’s hearing Thursday is the only event on her public calendar. The government has Öztürk scheduled for an immigration court hearing in Louisiana on Monday.
As this reporter was at the federal courthouse leafing through today’s filings just after 5 p.m., Casper walked out intently reading a similarly sized sheaf of papers.
This post was updated April 3, 2025, to add a Bluesky thread of reporting from the hearing.
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