Tufts Student Held by ICE Asks Court to Return Her Case to Massachusetts

• April 3, 2025, 6:39 p.m. ET

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student detained for pro-Palestinian activity, asked a federal judge in Boston on Thursday to have her case moved to Massachusetts, where she lives and was picked up by federal agents, from Louisiana, where she is being held in an immigration detention facility.

Her lawyer, Adriana Lafaille, argued that after detaining Ms. Ozturk, the government deliberately moved her to a location where it could expect a more sympathetic hearing for its case against her. The transfer was so furtive that not even the government’s own lawyers knew where she was, Ms. Lafaille, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the court.

Ms. Ozturk, a doctoral candidate, was detained on March 25 near her apartment in Somerville, Mass., by federal agents in plain clothes who surrounded her, cuffed her and drove her away in an unmarked S.U.V. Footage of the encounter, captured by a surveillance camera, was viewed by millions of people, and generated outrage that Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa, had been picked up off the street even though there were no charges against her.

The government was “secretly whisking her away and making sure that no one would know where she was until she was in Louisiana,” Ms. Lafaille said, adding that she believed the government was “forum shopping” a location for the trial. (Louisiana is home to one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.)

She added that it was “quite unusual that even the government’s own lawyers” were not told where Ms. Ozturk was.

A lawyer for the government said that Ms. Ozturk was moved out of state because there was no “bed space” at a detention center in Massachusetts to accommodate a female detainee.