US senator calls for Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk's release

WASHINGTON

US Sen. Ed Markey called Wednesday for the release of detained Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk.

His remarks came after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Ozturk to be transferred to a court in the state of Vermont.

"This is an important moment. It is a step in the right direction," Markey said in a video message on X.

Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, 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.

"She deserves to be free. But we can't stop here. We must keep speaking out against authoritarianism. That is what the Trump administration is all about.

"We must ultimately see the release of Rumeysa," Markey said.

Following her arrest, authorities transported her through multiple states before flying her to the state of Louisiana.

In early April, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the challenge to ICE’s detention of Ozturk should continue in Vermont, not Louisiana. A Vermont judge later agreed that her federal case should continue in Vermont and ordered ICE to transfer her back to a Vermont facility by May 1.

The government appealed on April 24, and last week, without ruling on the merits, the appeals court agreed to consider both the government’s request to keep her in Louisiana and her legal team’s opposition.

Her legal team said that since she arrived in Louisiana, Ozturk has lived in a "cramped room with poor ventilation" with 23 other women for almost all hours of the day.

In new filings in her federal court case in Vermont, Ozturk said she has suffered several asthma attacks that have "become progressively harder to recover from" while in detention.