By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday cleared the way for a Tufts University PhD student and pro-Palestinian activist Rumeysa Ozturk to work on campus after ordering the Trump administration to restore her status in a key database used to track foreign students.
Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston issued an injunction after concluding Ozturk was likely to succeed in proving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unlawfully terminated her record in the database the same day that masked, plainclothes agents took her into custody in March.
That ICE-maintained database is called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System and is used to track foreign students who enter on visas. The termination of a student’s record from that database prevents that person from being employed.
Ozturk in a statement said she was grateful for the ruling and that she hopes “that no one else experiences the injustices I have suffered.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ozturk’s arrest on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, was captured in a viral video that shocked many and drew criticism from civil rights groups.
She was detained after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa as the Trump administration moved to crack down on non-citizens who engaged in pro-Palestinian activism on campuses.
The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The former Fulbright scholar was held for 45 days in a detention facility in Louisiana until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had briefly been held, ordered her immediately released after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Following her release, Ozturk, a child development researcher, resumed her studies at Massachusetts-based Tufts.
But the administration’s refusal to restore her SEVIS record has prevented her from teaching or working as a research assistant, leading her lawyers to ask Casper to order its reinstatement so her academic and career development would not be further jeopardized in the final months before she graduates.
Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said the administration had provided “shifting justifications” for terminating Ozturk’s SEVIS record, at times wrongly claiming she had failed to maintain her lawful, foreign student status.
To the extent it now acknowledges she complied with rules governing foreign students like herself, “it is all the more irrational that the government has imposed negative consequences on her that are inconsistent with that status,” Casper wrote.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Aurora Ellis)
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