A federal judge has allowed a Tufts University student from Turkey to resume research and teaching while she deals with the consequences of having her visa revoked by the Trump administration, leading to six weeks of detention.
The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student studying children’s relationship to social media, was among the first as the Trump administration began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy. She had co-authored an op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. Caught on video in March outside her Somerville residence, immigration enforcement officers took her away in an unmarked vehicle.
Öztürk has been out of a Louisiana immigrant detention center since May and back on the Tufts campus. But she’s been unable to teach or participate in research as part of her studies because of the termination of her record in the government’s database of foreign students studying temporarily in the US.
All she did was write an article critical of genocide, and she was taken away in an unmarked vehicle and imprisoned.
Land of the free, right? Not an authoritarian hellhole at all…



