Judge orders restoration of key record belonging to Tufts student formerly detained by ICE
More than eight months after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk and removed her from a key federal international student database, a judge has ordered her record in the database restored.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper granted the Turkish doctoral student's request for a preliminary injunction in her ongoing case against the Trump administration.
Casper's order requires the reactivation of Öztürk's listing in the Student and Exchange Visa Information System (SEVIS) database, which ICE uses to track international students. The termination of her SEVIS record has prevented her from working and participating in research that is "integral to her graduate studies," the ACLU of Massachusetts, which is helping represent her, wrote in a press release.
ICE deactivated Öztürk's listing in the database hours after masked agents arrested her on the street near Tufts' Medford-Somerville campus on March 25. Her detainment a sparked widespread public outcry , and she was released on the order of a federal judge after spending over six weeks in ICE custody. Despite this, Öztürk's SEVIS record has not been restored.
On Thursday, the doctoral student's lawyers argued in federal court that her listing in SEVIS was unlawfully terminated . In her Monday decision, Casper found that Öztürk's claim that the termination violated the Administrative Procedure Act was likely to succeed in court.
"While I am grateful for the court's decision, I still feel a great deal of grief for all the educational rights I have been arbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies," Öztürk said in the ACLU of Massachusetts' press release.
Tufts is in contact with the doctoral student's lawyers and is "actively monitoring SEVIS to ensure her record is restored," a spokesperson for the university said Monday night. ICE did not have a comment on the matter prepared.
Öztürk's lawyers have maintained that federal officials revoked her student visa and ordered her detainment in retaliation for a pro-Palestine opinion article she co-authored in a Tufts student newspaper in March 2024.
"Every day that Ms. Öztürk's SEVIS record remained terminated was a day that the government continued to punish her for her constitutionally protected speech," Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in the release.
After Öztürk's arrest, ICE agents swiftly transported her to New Hampshire and then Vermont, before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Louisiana. Her lawyers could not locate or speak with her for more than a day following her arrest, they said previously.
After 45 days in detention, Vermont federal court Judge William K. Sessions III ordered Öztürk's release. He wrote in his decision that federal officials offered no justification for her arrest aside from the pro-Palestine article.
One State Department memo stated that Öztürk's student visa was revoked after officials concluded that her actions "may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization." ICE is still pursuing her removal from the country.
Öztürk is studying childhood development and media at Tufts and is set to complete her studies in May 2026, according to her lawyers.
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