US judge questions Trump administration's continued targeting of pro-Palestinian Tufts student

Source: US News and World Report/Reuters

Dec. 4, 2025, at 5:30 p.m.


BOSTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday said she was "struggling" to understand why President Donald Trump's administration is preventing a Tufts University PhD student who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism from working on campus nearly seven months after the Turkish citizen was released from an immigration detention center. Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper during a hearing in Boston questioned whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acted arbitrarily when it terminated Rumeysa Ozturk's status in a key database used to track foreign students after she co-wrote an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper criticizing her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.

"What’s the rationale for allowing the agency to have the discretion to terminate the record?” Casper asked. Ozturk's record in the ICE-maintained Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database was terminated on March 25, the same day that she was arrested by masked, plainclothes agents on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home, after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was the opinion piece, which criticized Tufts' response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide." The former Fulbright scholar was held for 45 days in a detention facility in Louisiana until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had briefly been held, ordered her immediately released after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation for views she shared in the op-ed in violation of her free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

Following her release, Ozturk resumed her studies at Tufts. But the administration’s refusal to restore her SEVIS record has prevented her from teaching or working as research assistant, jeopardizing her academic and career development in the final months before her graduation, said Adriana Lafaille, an attorney for Ozturk at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-12-04/us-judge-questions-trump-administrations-continued-targeting-of-pro-palestinian-tufts-student