HOUSTON, United States

A Turkish university student living in the US who was detained will be transferred from a Louisiana immigration facility to the state of Vermont ahead of a court hearing.

The hearing is to determine whether she was illegally taken into custody for writing a pro-Palestinian article in a student newspaper.

US District Court Judge William Sessions said Friday in a ruling that Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, had presented "significant evidence" to support allegations that her detention violated her free speech and due process rights, according to multiple news outlets.

Ozturk was apprehended by masked immigration officials March 25 in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb and subsequently driven to Vermont before being put on a plane and sent to a detention center in the state of Louisiana. She also had her student visa revoked after being arrested.

Ozturk's attorneys said they did not know where she was being held and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained, despite Ozturk making multiple requests to speak to a lawyer after she was arrested.

Her attorneys claimed her detention violates the US Constitution's rights of due process and free speech. Sessions said in court that Ozturk had "plausibly pled constitutional violations."

Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed last year in The Tufts Daily that criticized the school’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide," disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Ozturk is one of several foreign students attending American universities who have been detained by immigration officials and had their visas revoked because of their pro-Palestinian support and demonstrations on campus.

"Her evidence supports her argument that the government's motivation or purpose for her detention is to punish her for co-authoring an op-ed in a campus newspaper that criticized Tufts University's administration and to chill the political speech of others," said Sessions. "The government has so far offered no evidence to support an alternative, lawful motivation or purpose for Ms. Ozturk's detention."

The judge set a May 1 deadline for the government to transfer Ozturk to Vermont. She has a bond hearing scheduled in that state for May 9 and a petition hearing on her case May 22.