Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student and Turkish national, was released from federal custody on Friday, hours after a judge in Vermont ordered the Trump administration to free her. Accompanied by her lawyer, Öztürk walked out of the immigration detention center in rural Louisiana where she's been detained for more than six weeks, since masked federal agents picked her up on a suburban Boston street as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian student activists.
At a bail hearing earlier in the day, Judge William K. Sessions of the U.S. District Court for Vermont said that her arrest and detention appeared likely to have been carried out solely in retaliation for an op-ed she wrote in a campus newspaper criticizing her school leaders' response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
"I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk," Sessions said. "And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here."