US immigration judge denies bail to detained Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk

A Tufts University graduate student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last month in Somerville, Massachusetts, was denied bail by an immigration court in the state of Louisiana.

According to a petition filed on Wednesday in Vermont by her legal team, the immigration denied bail based on the “untenable conclusion” that Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk was “both a flight risk and a danger to the community”.

In the submission, Ozturk’s legal team urged the federal US District judge in Vermont to order that 30-year-old Ozturk be released or at least returned to Vermont by 18 April, following the immigration court ruling.

Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, was pursuing her PhD in child and human development at Tufts before the Trump administration targeted her for deportation for co-authoring an opinion article in the Tufts Daily student newspaper.

Ozturk was detained by masked plainclothes ICE agents on the street in Somerville on 25 March before being taken to an ICE detention centre in Basile, Louisiana. 

Read more: US immigration judge denies bail to detained Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk