A Federal judge has allowed a Tufts University student from Turkey to resume research and teaching while she deals with the consequences of having her visa revoked by the Trump administration, leading to six weeks of detention.

The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student studying children’s relationship to social media, was among the first as the Trump administration began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy. She had co-authored an op-ed criticising her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. Caught on video in March outside her Somerville residence, immigration enforcement officers took her away in an unmarked vehicle.

Ms. Öztürk has been out of a Louisiana immigrant detention centre since May and back on the Tufts campus. But she has been unable to teach or participate in research as part of her studies because of the termination of her record in the government’s database of foreign students studying temporarily in the U.S.

In her ruling on Monday (December 8, 2025), Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that Ms. Öztürk is likely to succeed on claims that the termination was “arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law and in violation of the First Amendment.” The government’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued that the Boston Federal Court lacked jurisdiction and that Ms. Öztürk’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System record (SEVIS) record was terminated legally after her visa was revoked, making her eligible for removal proceedings.

“There’s no statute or regulation that’s been violated by the termination of the SEVIS record in this case,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter said during a hearing last week. The Associated Press sent an email on Tuesday (December 9, 2025) seeking comment from Sauter on whether the government plans to appeal.

In a statement, Ms. Öztürk, who plans to graduate next year, said while she is grateful for the court’s decision, she feels “a great deal of grief” for the education she has been “arbitrarily denied as a scholar and a woman in my final year of doctoral studies”.

“I hope one day we can create a world where everyone uses education to learn, connect, civically engage and benefit others — rather than criminalise and punish those whose opinions differ from our own,” said Ms. Öztürk, who is still challenging her arrest and detention.

The then-30-year-old was one of four students who wrote the opinion piece in the campus newspaper. It criticised the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”, disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

A federal judge on Monday (December 8, 2025) cleared the way for a Tufts University PhD student and pro-Palestinian activist Rumeysa Ozturk to work on campus after ordering the Trump administration to restore her status in a key database used to track foreign students.

Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston issued an injunction after concluding Ozturk was likely to succeed in proving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unlawfully terminated her record in the database the same day that masked, plainclothes agents took her into custody in March.

That ICE-maintained database is called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System and is used to track foreign students who enter on visas. The termination of a student’s record from that database prevents that person from being employed.

Ms. Ozturk in a statement said she was grateful for the ruling and that she hopes “that no one else experiences the injustices I have suffered.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Ozturk’s arrest on a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, was captured in a viral video that shocked many and drew criticism from civil rights groups.

She was detained after the U.S. Department of State revoked her student visa as the Trump administration moved to crack down on non-citizens who engaged in pro-Palestinian activism on campuses.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

The former Fulbright scholar was held for 45 days in a detention facility in Louisiana until a federal judge in Vermont, where she had briefly been held, ordered her immediately released after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Following her release, Ms. Ozturk, a child development researcher, resumed her studies at Massachusetts-based Tufts.

But the administration’s refusal to restore her SEVIS record has prevented her from teaching or working as a research assistant, leading her lawyers to ask Casper to order its reinstatement so her academic and career development would not be further jeopardized in the final months before she graduates.

Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said the administration had provided “shifting justifications” for terminating Ozturk’s SEVIS record, at times wrongly claiming she had failed to maintain her lawful, foreign student status.

To the extent it now acknowledges she complied with rules governing foreign students like herself, “it is all the more irrational that the government has imposed negative consequences on her that are inconsistent with that status,” Casper wrote.