An immigration judge has found there were no grounds to deport a Turkish graduate student whose arrest by masked agents last year was an early salvo in the Trump Administration’s crackdown on migrants.
The decision by the judge, Roopal Patel, came last month and was disclosed in federal court by lawyers for the student, Rumeysa Ozturk, this week. It effectively means that the government has no legal justification to deport Ms. Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University.
Judge Roopal, who as an immigration judge is a Justice Department employee, blocked any further proceedings against Ms. Ozturk, but the government can appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
Justice and State Department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer for Ms. Ozturk, said that the decision was a “powerful affirmation of fairness and the rule of law.”
“We hope this decision serves as a reminder that immigration enforcement must always be guided by justice,” she said in an email, adding, “If the Sec. of State can on a whim decide to revoke a person’s visa what does that say about impartiality, the rule of law, and transparency?”
Ms. Ozturk was arrested in Somerville, Mass., in March 2025, and footage of the terrified student being whisked into a car by masked government agents led to an outcry from critics of the Trump administration. She was held in detention in Louisiana for 45 days until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had been driven before she was moved to Louisiana, released her on bail.
Documents from a different legal case in Massachusetts recently revealed that the sole reason the government sought to deport Ms. Ozturk was that she had cowritten an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper calling on the school’s leadership to consider pro-Palestinian student resolutions related to Israel.
Shortly after Ms. Ozturk’s arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that her visa had been revoked, saying that she had participated in a pro-Palestinian movement that upended American university campuses.
“Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt?” he said, adding that it was a privilege to study in the United States — not a right.
Judge Roopal found, though, that Mr. Rubio’s revocation of Ms. Ozturk’s visa did not require her removal from the country, because Ms. Ozturk’s legal status in the United States is not predicated on the visa. The mere revocation of a visa does not automatically justify a person’s deportation, the judge found.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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