Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was arrested during the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus speech, has returned to Turkey after completing her studies, the group representing her said on Friday.
Her arrest, in March 2025, was an early battle in the Trump administration’s targeting of university campuses. Armed and masked immigration agents surrounded her and whisked her into a van. She spent six weeks in federal custody. First, she was driven to New Hampshire, then Vermont and then flown to a detention facility in Louisiana.
In a statement posted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. Ozturk, who completed her Ph.D. in child study and human development, said she was proud to return home on her own timeline.
“The time stolen from me by the U.S. government belongs not just to me, but to the children and youth I have dedicated my life to advocating for,” she said.
The Trump administration had framed its arrest of Ms. Ozturk as part of its broader strategy to combat campus antisemitism. Ms. Ozturk had been an author of an opinion piece in the student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, criticizing the university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands. She and her supporters denied that she was antisemitic.
In the Friday statement, she said she had chosen to return home “without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States — all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights.”
Ms. Ozturk was released from detention in May after a federal judge said her continued detention would potentially chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”
Earlier this year, an immigration judge in Boston found there were no grounds to deport Ms. Ozturk. The judge, Roopal Patel, was fired this month by the Trump administration.
Mark Arsenault contributed reporting.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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