By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, April 17 (Reuters) – A Tufts University graduate who was arrested by U.S. immigration agents last year as part of the targeting by President Donald Trump’s administration of pro-Palestinian campus activists has returned to her home in Turkey following a settlement with the U.S. government.
Lawyers for Rumeysa Ozturk announced the accord on Friday, a week after the administration fired an immigration judge who had in January rejected the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to deport her.
The administration had been appealing that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the U.S. Justice Department. It also was awaiting a ruling by a federal appeals court in its bid to overturn another judge’s decision that led to Ozturk’s release from immigration custody in May 2025.
Friday’s settlement resolved all of the legal proceedings, her attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union said, and let Ozturk return to Turkey unhindered after completing her PhD program in child study and human development in February at Tufts, which is located in Massachusetts.
The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa to the United States was an editorial she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper in 2024 criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States – all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights,” Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, said in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security in a statement said it was “glad to see Ozturk self-deported from the U.S.” It said visas that allow foreign students to study and work in the United States “are a privilege, not a right.”
The ACLU said the U.S. government in Friday’s settlement acknowledged Ozturk always had lawful status while in the United States.
Ozturk’s case was an example of the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport non-U.S. citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.
She was held for 45 days in a Louisiana facility after immigration authorities in March 2025 arrested her on a street in Massachusetts after the U.S. State Department revoked her student visa.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Will Dunham)
Comments