Varsity student Rumeysa returns to Massachusetts after release from immigration custody

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student from Turkey who spent more than six weeks in an immigration detention center in Louisiana returned to Massachusetts on Saturday.

Rumeysa was swept up in the campaign by President Donald Trump’s administration to deport pro-Palestinian campus activists.

She was arrested after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

According to Reuters, Rumeysa told reporters after arriving at Logan International Airport in Boston that she was excited to get back to her studies and community after a judge ordered her immediately released on Friday.

“This has been a very difficult time for me,” she said at a press conference with her lawyers and local members of Congress.

Rumeysa thanked her supporters, including professors and students who have sent her letters, and urged the public not to forget about hundreds of other women still housed in the detention center.

“America is the greatest democracy in the world. I have faith in the American system of justice,” she’s quoted by Reuters.

The 30-year-old PhD student was arrested on March 25 by masked plainclothes officers on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, near her home, after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa.

Her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union argued that her arrest and detention were unlawfully designed to punish her for speech protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and to chill the speech of others.

U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, who with two other Democratic members of Congress from Massachusetts visited Rumeysa while she was in custody, said she was held in “squalid, inhumane conditions” and denied proper medical care for worsening asthma attacks.

“Rumeysa’s experience was not just an act of cruelty, it was a deliberate, coordinated attempt to intimidate, to instill fear, to send a chilling message to anyone who dares to speak out against injustice,” Pressley said.

After her arrest, she was briefly held in Vermont and then quickly flown to Louisiana by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

She filed a lawsuit challenging her detention that is now assigned to U.S. District Judge William Sessions in Burlington, Vermont.

The Judge granted Rumeysa bail on Friday after finding her claim of rights violation substantial.