Tufts University Student Rumeysa returns home after ICE detention

Noman Sabit: Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last year, has completed her Ph.D. program and is returning to her home country of Turkey, her lawyers announced Friday.

Ozturk was detained by ICE in 2025 after she co-authored an opinion piece for the student newspaper criticizing her school’s response to the Israel-Gaza war. She was released by a judge who said there was “absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.”

“After 13 years of dedicated study, I am very proud to have completed my Ph.D. and to return home on my own timeline,” Ozturk said in a statement. “The time stolen from me by the U.S. government belongs not just to me, but to the children and youth I have dedicated my life to advocating for. With them in mind, I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States – all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights.”

The Trump administration and Ozturk came to a settlement to dismiss her immigration proceedings and the government agreed to say Öztürk had lawful status in the U.S. throughout her stay, the American Civil Liberties Union announced. The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

She is one of a number of pro-Palestinian foreign students who were detained last year by ICE.

Mahmoud Khalil, the first pro-Palestinian student detained by the Trump administration, spent months in custody and missed the birth of his first child.

The Trump administration is still fighting for the deportation of these students, with Khalil recently receiving a final order of removal from the Board of Immigration Appeals. He cannot be detained or deported due to another case against the Trump administration in federal court.

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