Judge Orders Transfer of Tufts Student from Louisiana to Vermont

A Tufts University student from Turkey being held in a Louisiana immigration facility must be returned to New England no later than May 1 to determine whether she was illegally detained for co-writing an op-ed piece in the student newspaper, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions said he would hear Rumeysa Ozturk’s request to be released from detention in Burlington, Vermont, with a bail hearing set for May 9 and a hearing on the petition’s merits on May 22. Ozturk’s lawyers had requested that she be released immediately, or at least brought back to Vermont, while the Justice Department argued that an immigration court in Louisiana had jurisdiction.

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