Tufts student detained by U.S. immigration for op-ed on Gaza is released [Video]

A Tufts University student from Turkey who was held for over six weeks in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza was released from custody on Friday after a federal judge granted her bail.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vt., ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the centre of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.

The judge said Ozturk, whose arrest in Massachusetts in March was captured in a viral video, had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was “simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”

“Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the …