The federal courthouse in Boston became the stage for a rare reversal, as a Tufts University doctoral student—swept into the storm of pro-Palestinian activism crackdowns—won back the bureaucratic lifeline she’d been denied for months.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD candidate and vocal campus advocate, walked out of court with something far more consequential than a ruling: a restored academic future. A judge ordered the reinstatement of her student status in the federal system that tracks foreign scholars, undoing the restrictions that had barred her from teaching or holding research work.
According to the court’s order, immigration authorities had abruptly terminated her standing in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System—the digital gatekeeper for every international student in the United States—the very day plainclothes officers seized her off a Somerville street in March. That database entry isn’t just a formality; without it, campus employment becomes impossible.
Ozturk said she was thankful for the decision and hoped others would be spared the path she was forced to walk.
Her ordeal had already gained national attention after video of her arrest ricocheted across social media. It came during a push by federal officials to target non-citizens involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy, and her visa was pulled over an opinion piece she co-wrote a year earlier criticizing her university’s response to the war in Gaza.
She spent 45 days in a Louisiana detention center before another federal judge ordered her immediate release, finding she had shown strong grounds that the government’s actions were retaliatory and in conflict with her First Amendment rights.
Back at Tufts, she pressed on with her studies, but without her restored record she remained barred from teaching and assisting with research—core elements of her academic program. Her attorneys urged the court to intervene before her graduation window closed.
The judge found the government’s explanations inconsistent, at times accusing her of falling out of compliance only to later concede she had followed the rules. Imposing penalties on a student who had met the requirements, the judge wrote, simply made no sense.
With the ruling now in hand, Ozturk can finally return to the work she came to the U.S. to do—after months of being sidelined not by scholarship, but by a system that briefly chose to treat her voice as a violation.
