By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – The Trump administration urged a U.S. appeals court on Tuesday to allow immigration authorities to continue to detain students at Tufts University and Columbia University who were arrested after engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.
A lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice asked the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause lower-court orders requiring Tuft’s Rumeysa Ozturk to be transferred to Vermont for a bail hearing on Friday and allowing Columbia’s Mohsen Mahdawi to be released last week.
Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said those orders by two judges in Vermont should never have been issued, as Congress has made clear that any challenges to the government’s decisions to deport someone must proceed in immigration court.
“The result is precisely what Congress took particular care to avoid: simultaneous proceedings in both immigration courts and district courts considering the same issues regarding the removal of aliens from the United States,” he said.
He urged the court to allow the administration to avoid moving Ozturk from the Louisiana detention facility she is being held in and to allow immigration authorities to swiftly take Mahdawi back into custody.
But lawyers for Ozturk and Mahdawi countered that their lawsuits were not about the government’s ability to seek their deportation but instead were focused on claims they were unlawfully detained for making constitutionally protected statements critical of Israel’s actions during the Gaza war.
Mahdawi, born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, said he was arrested last month upon arriving for an interview for his U.S. citizenship petition in Vermont in retaliation for his advocacy against Israel’s war and role in student protests.
Lawyers for Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student, say she was arrested in March in Somerville, Massachusetts and shipped to Louisiana for detention after a brief stop in Vermont in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Her lawyers say she is being punished for co-authoring an opinion piece in Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies linked to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
“Rumeya Ozturk’s case is unprecedented and shocking,” said Esha Bhandari, her lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “She has been held behind bars for six weeks while her health deteriorates for writing an op-ed.”
Members of the three-judge panel appeared to struggle with whether immigration law stripped the courts of jurisdiction over the students’ claims, with U.S. Circuit Judge Susan Carney calling the issue “difficult to untangle.”
But she spoke critically of how Ozturk was arrested in the first place, saying she was “seized in Somerville on the streets by an unmarked vehicle and seized by people who are not in uniform and who are masked and hooded.”
U.S. Circuit Judge Barrington Parker questioned whether under the administration’s view of the law someone like Ozturk would be able to even challenge their detention if they believed they were being held due to a case of mistaken identity.
“How would she be able to challenge that without having to wait months and months in removal proceedings?” he asked.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Comments