Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has returned to Turkey after reaching a legal settlement with the Trump administration that ended nearly a year of immigration proceedings against her — proceedings that began after she co-signed a student newspaper opinion piece calling for her university to acknowledge what she and her co-authors described as Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
Öztürk's arrest in late March 2025 drew widespread attention after surveillance footage went viral showing six plainclothed, masked immigration officers surrounding her on the street outside her apartment as she left to break her Ramadan fast. She was transported across several states before being held for 45 days in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, where she later described overcrowding, inadequate food, insufficient medical care, and constant lighting that disrupted sleep. She has no criminal record. The Department of Homeland Security accused her of having "engaged in activities in support of Hamas," but internal government records obtained through a separate lawsuit showed no evidence beyond the op-ed itself to support that characterisation.
The Trump administration relied on a rarely invoked provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the secretary of state to revoke a foreign national's visa if their presence is deemed to pose "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences." Secretary of State Marco Rubio used this authority to terminate Öztürk's visa, along with those of other international students involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy. Legal experts have argued that such speech is protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and an immigration judge earlier this year ruled that the government had no grounds to deport her — a ruling the Trump administration initially appealed before agreeing to settle. That immigration judge was subsequently dismissed, in what observers have described as part of a broader effort to reshape the immigration court system.
Under the terms of the settlement, all deportation proceedings were dropped, the government acknowledged that Öztürk had been legally present in the United States throughout her stay, and her international student status was formally reinstated. Öztürk had already completed her PhD in child study and human development in February, making her departure on her own terms. "After 13 years of dedicated study, I am very proud to have completed my PhD and to return home on my own timeline," she said in a statement released through the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Her case was among the most prominent in a broader pattern of deportation actions taken by the Trump administration against foreign scholars and students involved in pro-Palestinian campus activism, which intensified following Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel and Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza. Öztürk's departure underscores ongoing tensions between the administration's immigration enforcement priorities and principles of academic freedom and free speech. "I stand firmly in solidarity with academic communities in the US and elsewhere who live in fear for nothing more than their scholarship," she said, adding that she intended to continue her career in Turkey.