A federal judge ordered Friday that the case to free Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student from Turkey, from the detention of immigration should be moved to a court in Vermond, refusing the government’s demand to carry out the process of Louisiana.
Ms Ozturk, a legal resident of a student visa, swept from the government as part of what Trump’s administration described as a campaign against anti -Semitic activists on campus.
At a hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for the US Union of Civil Freedoms claimed that the government had brought her secrets from Massachusetts, where she was arrested, to Louisiana without informing her lawyers where she was. Lawyer, Adriana Lafaille, suggested that the government was looking for a court that would favor its case.
Louisiana has one of the most conservative appeal courts in the country.
Government lawyers told the court that Ms. Ozturk had been transferred to Louisiana because there was no bed available for a female holder in New England and that there was no intention of withholding information about her location.
In its ruling on Friday, Judge Denise Casper of the US District Court in Boston said that Vermond was the right place because Ms. Ozturk was held there overnight that her lawyers – without knowing where she was – applied for her release.
Normally, a reference to someone’s release will be deposited in jurisdiction where man was limited.
Judge Casper wrote that he was transferring the case to Vermont “in the interest of justice”.
“The irregularity of arrest, detention and processing here is combined with the failure to disclose Ozturk’s place, even after the government’s awareness that he had advice and the report was tabled in this court,” the judge wrote.
On March 25, the federal agents in simple clothes, some on masks, surround Ms. Ozturk on the street in front of her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, took her phone and handcuffed her. Her lawyers were unable to find her for almost 24 hours, as agents drove her through New Hampshire to Vermont before putting her on a plane early in the morning in Louisiana, where she is now held at the South Louisiana Ice Center in Basile.
In a statement after the arrest of Ms Ozturk, the Ministry of the Internal Security said it tried to displace it because it had “carried out activities to support Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that enjoys the murder of Americans”.
The only proof that emerged against her is an opinion essay that criticizes Israel’s behavior on the Gaza war that other students wrote and published in the Student newspaper. But the university stated that the essay was fulfilling its standards and that it had not received any information to justify its arrest.
The judge’s ruling is one of two defeats for the government this week in such cases. On Tuesday, a federal judge of New Jersey ruled that the case for the liberation of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, whom the government also seeks to deport, will remain in New Jersey, instead of being transferred. He is also held in a center there as the court struggle is moving.
