An Immigration Judge Finds No Legal Basis To Deport a Student Arrested for an Op-Ed
Rumeysa Ozturk is one of several international students targeted by the Trump administration's speech-based deportation policy.
Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was targeted for deportation nearly a year ago because she had co-authored an anti-Israel op-ed piece that appeared in a student newspaper, can remain in the United States thanks to a recent decision by an immigration judge. In that ruling, which came to light this week after Ozturk's lawyers mentioned it in federal court, Judge Roopal Patel, who works for the Justice Department, concluded that there was no legal basis to deport Ozturk.
The Trump administration can ask the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative body within the Justice Department, to review that decision. But Ozturk is safe for now. "Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system's flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government," she said in a written statement. "Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all."
Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was one of several international students targeted by the speech-based deportation campaign that President Donald Trump began promising on the campaign trail and repeatedly trumpeted after taking office. She was arrested by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside her apartment building in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25. Her lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition in Massachusetts, but it was transferred to Vermont after she was sent there. She was later sent to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where she remained until William K. Sessions, a federal judge in Vermont, ordered her release on May 9.
In a March 21 memo explaining the justification for revoking Ozturk's student visa, a State Department official said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had determined that she was "involved in associations that 'may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization,' including [co-authoring] an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus." Although the official implied there was more evidence aside from that essay, the government never presented any.
In the op-ed piece, which The Tufts Daily published a year before Ozturk's arrest, she and her co-authors described Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza as "the Palestinian genocide" and expressed support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. But they did not praise Hamas or its murderous tactics. And even if they had, such speech would be constitutionally protected.
The Washington Post reported that an internal State Department memo written "days before" Ozturk's arrest concluded that the DHS "had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization." The DHS nevertheless claimed Ozturk "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans." It added that "glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated," which it called "commonsense security."
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about Ozturk's detention at a press conference two days after her arrest, he implied that she was guilty by association. "If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student," he said, and "the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just 'cause you wanna write op-eds, but because you wanna participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we're not gonna give you a visa."
It would be "stupid for any country in the world to welcome people" who are "going to your universities to start a riot," "take over a library," or "harass people," Rubio said. But he did not claim Ozturk had done anything like that.
Even as he equated writing an op-ed piece with starting a riot, Rubio implied that the government had additional evidence against Ozturk. "I would caution you against solely going off of what the media has been able to identify," he said, "and those presentations, if necessary, will be made in court." But they never were.
"In support of her First Amendment claim, [Ozturk] has submitted evidence to show that the actions against her were retaliatory, as the only identifiable conduct supporting her detention is her coauthoring of a Tufts University op-ed," Sessions noted in an April 18 opinion. "The government has submitted no evidence to counter her First Amendment claim."
That was still true a month later. Given Rubio's "public statements seemingly offering to make presentations in court to justify Ms. Ozturk's detention," Sessions noted on May 16, he had "invited an immediate submission of any relevant evidence," but "no such submission has been received." The government, he said, "has neither rebutted the argument that retaliation for Ms. Ozturk's op-ed was the motivation for her detention nor identified another specific reason for Ms. Ozturk's detention, arguing instead that such decisions are committed to the discretion of the executive branch."
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which submitted a brief in support of Ozturk, noted the chilling implications. "It is unthinkable that a person in a free society could be snatched from the street, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation for expressing an opinion the government dislikes," it said. The brief, which was joined by the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Rutherford Institute, PEN America, the Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, noted that Rubio "deemed Ozturk deportable "not because the government claims she committed a crime or other deportable offense" but "for the seemingly sole reason that her expression—an op-ed in a student newspaper—stirred the Trump administration to anger."
In a separate case, two academic organizations asked William Young, a federal judge in Boston, for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration's speech-chilling "ideological deportation policy." That policy, the government's lawyers improbably responded, "does not exist." During the trial in July, a government witness concurred that "it's silly to suggest that there's such a policy."
Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, disagreed. Federal officials "acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech," he concluded in September. Young found "clear and convincing evidence" that Rubio, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and their underlings, "deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations."
To justify the Trump administration's supposedly nonexistent policy of deporting students based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy, Rubio relied on his broad authority under 8 USC 1227(a)(4)(C)(i), which allows deportation of "an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States." Although the text of Judge Patel's ruling in favor of Ozturk is not available, he presumably considered that rationale, which the government cited in her case.
"We are grateful that the Judge carefully considered the facts and the law, and we hope this decision serves as a reminder that immigration enforcement must always be guided by justice," Mahsa Khanbabai, Ozturk's immigration attorney, told CNN. A DHS spokesperson had a different take, saying Patel had engaged in "judicial activism" to "keep a terrorist sympathizer in this country." The spokesperson added that Noem "has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism" should "think again."
