# Rumeysa Ozturk **Rümeysa Öztürk** is a Turkish scholar of child development who completed her Ph.D. at Tufts University's Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development in February 2026. She studied in the United States on an **F-1 student visa**. On **March 25, 2025**, plainclothes ICE agents arrested her on a Somerville, Massachusetts sidewalk as she walked to an iftar dinner with friends, four days after the State Department had quietly revoked her visa. She was moved across three states overnight and flown the next day to a detention facility in **Basile, Louisiana**. She was held there for **45 days**, until U.S. District Judge **William K. Sessions III** (D. Vt.) ordered her release on **May 9, 2025**. He found that her arrest "appeared likely to have been carried out solely in retaliation" for a single 2024 student-newspaper op-ed. The government produced no evidence beyond that **one Tufts Daily op-ed**, which she had co-authored, criticizing Tufts University's response to the war in Gaza. Her case became one of the cleanest [[First Amendment]] rebukes of the broader [[Ideological Deportations]] campaign on the public record. ## How it ended - **The immigration case collapsed.** An immigration judge terminated her removal proceedings, as her lawyers announced on February 9, 2026, finding DHS had no legal grounds to deport her. DHS appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Separately, a federal court had ordered her wrongfully terminated SEVIS student record restored in December 2025, and the government appealed that too. - **The settlement.** In April 2026 the parties settled. They jointly asked the BIA to terminate the proceedings. The government acknowledged that she had held lawful nonimmigrant status throughout her time in the U.S. and that the SEVIS termination was void, and the habeas and SEVIS cases were dismissed, including the government's pending appeals in the First and Second Circuits. She was free to leave without DHS interference and returned to Turkey. - **Her framing.** "I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced." The settlement means no appellate court ruled on the government's theory. Sessions's retaliation finding and the immigration judge's termination stand as the record. The full incident, legal mechanism and timeline are documented at the event page [[Rumeysa Ozturk Detention]]. ## See also - [[Rumeysa Ozturk Detention]] · [[Ideological Deportations]] · [[AAUP v. Rubio]] - [[Mahmoud Khalil]] · [[Badar Khan Suri]] · [[Mohsen Mahdawi]]: the same campaign, different endings - [[Marco Rubio]]: the foreign-policy determination behind the visa revocation