A Tufts University student from Turkiye was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb.
US District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she’s been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue.
“Despite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,” attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.
Even before her release, Ozturk’s supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of “She is free!”
“What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. “There’s absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.”

Appearing by video for her bail hearing, Ozturk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate degree focusing on children and social media while appearing remotely at her bail hearing from the Louisiana center. She and her lawyer hugged after hearing the judge’s decision.
“Completing my Ph.D. is very important to me,” she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested.
Ozturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, but that he might amend his release order to consider any specific conditions by ICE in consultation with her lawyers.
Sessions said the government had offered no evidence about why Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed.
“This is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career,” Sessions said. “This is someone who probably doesn’t have a whole lot of other things going on other than reaching out to other members of the community in a caring and compassionate way.”
A message seeking comment was emailed Friday afternoon to the US Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Sessions told Acting US Attorney Michael Drescher he wants to know immediately when she is released.
Sessions said Ozturk raised serious concerns about her First Amendment and due process rights, as well as her health. She testified Friday that she has had 12 asthma attacks since her detention, starting with a severe one at the Atlanta airport.
“I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.
Ozturk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Ozturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings. She is expected to return to New England on Saturday at the earliest.
“I will follow all the rules,” she said.
A State Department memo said Ozturk’s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions ”‘may undermine US 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.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
“When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?” Khanbabai asked. “I am thankful that the courts have been ruling in favor of detained political prisoners, like Rumeysa.”
 

Joyce Lokonyi sits on an upturned bucket, fingers weaving palm fronds as the wind pulls her dress to expose the stump of her amputated foot, lost to a little-known disease ravaging Kenya’s poorest county.
Mycetoma is a fungal or bacterial infection that enters the body through any open wound, often as tiny as a thorn prick.
Starting as tiny bumps under the skin, it gradually leads to the erosion of tissue, muscles and bone.
The fungal variety is endemic across the so-called “mycetoma belt” — including Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and northern Kenya — with funding and research desperately lacking.
Once the disease has reached the bone the only option is amputation.
“I was able to slightly walk, although the disease had eaten all my toes,” Lokonyi, 28, told AFP.
She was shunned by the local community, she said.
“They used to say that when you go to someone’s home, you will leave traces of the disease where you stand.”
She was unable to afford medication despite her husband selling off his goats, and amputation became the only option.
“I accepted because I saw that it was going to kill me,” she said, a pair of battered crutches lying on the sand beside her two-year-old daughter.
But she has struggled with the aftermath.
“I have become a good-for-nothing, I can’t work, I can’t burn charcoal, I can’t do anything,” she said.
In Kenya’s poorest county, Turkana, around 70 percent of the population lives beneath the poverty line, with health care limited and hard to reach.
Mycetoma disproportionately affects rural communities of farmers and herders, according to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative , a global NGO.
It was only recognized as a neglected disease by the World Health Organization in 2016. Ignorance and misdiagnosis remain widespread.
“Doctors are not aware of the disease,” Borna Nyaoke-Anoke, DNDi’s head of mycetoma research, told AFP.
“If you’re used to donkeys, you don’t start seeing zebras everywhere.”
The scale of the problem is difficult to estimate, but Ekiru Kidalio, director of Lodwar Hospital in Turkana, said they “rarely go a week without finding a case.”
He added that the local population, 80 percent of which is illiterate, often turns to traditional medicine.
By the time they come to hospital “the condition is already advanced such that it’s not easy to reverse.”
Medication is also expensive — treatment takes up to a year and costs as much as $2,000 — and comes with dizzying side effects.
Diagnosis and treatment are not free under Kenya’s overwhelmed health system, leaving patients at the mercy of foreign donors or seeking sums that are unimaginable for subsistence farmers.
In Lodwar Hospital, lab technician John Ekai bends over his microscope and examines a suspected mycetoma sample.
“Mycetoma is a very neglected disease, no-one is giving it attention,” he told AFP.
He has become the go-to man for suspected patients, handling his charges with a mischievous sense of humor that puts them at ease.
Ekai has treated more than 100 mycetoma patients in the past year, but has seen only five recoveries, with many simply vanishing back into Turkana’s arid plains.
He worries for those who have disappeared: “The mycetoma will grow and grow and maybe... lead to amputation.”
During AFP’s visit, he examined young mother Jennifer Ekal, 19, who had lived with the disease since she was 11.
“I was in school but I decided to leave because of my foot,” she said, showing her swollen and painful extremity, hidden beneath a red-and-white dishcloth.
Four doses of medication a day appeared to be helping, she said.
But as she gathered up her daughter, three-year-old Bianca, she admitted she was worried about the future.
“I do not want to think about the worst.”