The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was being detained in Louisiana. A federal judge said her detention threatened to chill the speech of millions of noncitizens.
A federal judge in Vermont ordered the Trump administration on Friday to release Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student whose sudden arrest in March led to a public outcry.
The judge, William K. Sessions III, said Ms. Ozturk should be freed immediately. “Her continued detention cannot stand,” Judge Sessions said, adding that her continued detention “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.”
Ms. Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, has been in detention since March 25, when she was surrounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and plainclothes outside her home in Somerville, Mass. The agents handcuffed and hustled her into an unmarked car, and then drove her through New Hampshire to Vermont, where she was put on a plane to a detention center in Louisiana.
In seeking her release, her lawyers have accused the government of detaining her in unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay critical of Israel that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year.
Government lawyers in a hearing earlier this week declined to discuss questions about speech raised by an appeals court judge. But Judge Sessions did not mince words on Friday, suggesting the government was trying to deport Ms. Ozturk based on the slenderest of evidence that she had posed a threat to American foreign policy interests.
“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” he said in granting her release.
