A federal judge Friday blocked the government from deporting a Tufts University student detained by ICE earlier this week. Here’s the latest on this developing story.
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A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the government from deporting Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University student from Turkey whose arrest by ICE earlier this week continues to draw pushback from a growing number of elected officials.
The judge says the court needs to be able to consider a petition that has been filed by Ozturk, and the federal government can't deport her while that process is ongoing.
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Ozturk's lawyer is calling this ruling by a U.S. Circuit Court judge in Massachusetts the first step to getting her back home to Boston.
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The attorney called her client's treatment cruel and unconstitutional.
The Tufts grad student is now believed to be in a Louisiana ICE detention center.
The government has accused her of supporting Hamas and terminated her F-1 visa.
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Many people at Tufts believe this is all tied to an op-ed Ozturk co-authored in the school paper urging the university to divest from companies tied to Israel.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the action this week, saying the U.S. has a right to take visas away and remove people who are here visiting.
"And once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States, and we have a right like every country in the world has a right to remove you from our country. So it's just that simple," he said.
"The Trump Administration is sending a very clear message to everyone in America that if you dare to disagree with the government, they will be punished," said Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
The federal judge is giving the government until the end of the day Tuesday to respond to Ozturk's lawyers' arguments that the case should stay under the jurisdiction of the federal court in Massachusetts.
