Judge Ends Deportation Proceedings Against Öztürk

An immigration judge in Boston has terminated deportation proceedings for Rümeysa Öztürk, an international Ph.D. student from Turkey who is studying at Tufts University, MassLive and The Boston Globe reported. Öztürk’s case garnered national attention after she was grabbed off the streets of Somerville, Mass., by plainclothes immigration officers last March; immigration officials targeted her as part of a larger campaign to detain pro-Palestinian international scholars and students.

She was held for over a month and released in May. But it wasn’t until December that her status in SEVIS, the database for international students, was restored, allowing her to resume teaching and research.

Öztürk’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that an immigration judge fully halted the removal proceedings against Öztürk in late January, finding that the Department of Homeland Security did not meet “its burden of proving removability.”

“The Trump administration has weaponized our immigration system to target valued members of our communities, including scholars like Rümeysa,” Öztürk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said in the statement to the Globe. “It has manipulated immigration laws to silence people who advocate for Palestinian human rights and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Secretly revoking the visa of someone who has maintained their lawful immigration status as an excuse to detain them and place them into deportation proceedings is Kafkaesque.”