US federal judge orders release of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk on bail

By Diyar Guldogan

WASHINGTON (AA) - A federal judge in the US state of Vermont on Friday ordered the release on bail of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was controversially detained by immigration agents in late March.

"The court finds that she does not pose a danger to the community, nor does she present a risk of flight. The court orders the government to release Ms. Ozturk from custody immediately," Judge William K. Sessions III said.

The judge added that Ozturk is free to return to her home in Massachusetts.

"She's also free to travel to Massachusetts and Vermont as she sees fit, and I am not going to put a travel restriction on her, because, frankly, I don't find that she poses any risk of flight," he said.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, appeared remotely at the court hearing in Burlington, Vermont, more than six weeks after she was arrested on March 25 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Massachusetts for co-authoring an op-ed last year about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the school’s student newspaper.

The hearing came after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered earlier this week Ozturk to be transferred from an immigration jail in the state of Louisiana to a federal district court in Vermont.