Detained Turkish student's legal team to urge appeals court not to delay transfer to Vermont

WASHINGTON

The legal team of Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained by immigration authorities, will urge an appeals court Tuesday not to delay her transfer to the state of Vermont.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan will hear arguments on whether a federal judge’s order to transfer Ozturk should be granted or further delayed.

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.

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.

"Whereas her attacks used to last between 5-15 minutes, they now can last up to 45 minutes. She is regularly exposed to asthma triggers, including insect and rodent droppings, and is almost never exposed to fresh air," according to the filing.