An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.
Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.
An immigration judge on 29 January concluded the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.
Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by immigration judge Roopal Patel in Boston.
That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Öztürk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March on a street in Massachusetts after DHS revoked her student visa.
The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’s student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.
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