Court sides with student detained by Trump’s deportation thugs
President Donald Trump suffered a loss Wednesday in his attack on the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments. A three-judge panel from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that his administration cannot continue to detain Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk in a Louisiana correctional facility and must transfer her back to Vermont by May 14.
“The District of Vermont is likely the proper venue to adjudicate Öztürk’s habeas petition because, at the time she filed, she was physically in Vermont and her immediate custodian was unknown,” the court wrote in its ruling.
Öztürk is one of several high-profile cases that legal experts and civil rights activists justifiably characterize as unconstitutional arrests carried out by thugs in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. These detentions are emblematic of a broader campaign targeting international college students as so-called foreign threats, without due process or credible evidence.
The administration has claimed it sent students like Öztürk to Louisiana due to a lack of space in local facilities where they were arrested—a claim a federal court in Massachusetts found dubious after pointing out there was space in facilities much closer to where she was detained.
Experts believe the Trump administration’s actual motive for using states like Louisiana to detain students is a way to funnel legal appeals through the country’s most conservative, and Trump-appointed, 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—which oversees cases out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
Related | ‘It looked like a kidnapping’: Students continue to go missing under Trump
Öztürk was pulled off the street in front of her apartment in what onlookers said “looked like a kidnapping.” ProPublica reported “Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. Öztürk screams.”
Others have faced similar hurdles. On Tuesday, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student who was pulled from his home in New York City and taken to Louisiana in March, won a legal victory when the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to appeal an earlier court ruling requiring that his case be heard in New Jersey.
Also on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled that Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, arrested at his Arlington County home and sent to a facility in Texas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, must have his case heard in Virginia.
And at the end of April, Mohsen Mahdawi, another Columbia student was released from Homeland Security custody in Vermont, while the Trump administration scrambles to create a case for his deportation. Like the others targeted by the Trump administration, Mahdawi has been living in the United States legally while going through the immigration process.
The judicial pushback against the Trump administration’s authoritarian attempts to throw out the Constitution is heartening but the fight is far from over.