Judge Orders Return of Tufts Student Held in Louisiana Amid Concerns Over Detention Legality

A Tufts University student from Turkey being held in a Louisiana immigration facility must be returned to New England no later than May 1 to determine whether she was illegally detained for co-writing an op-ed piece in the student newspaper, a federal judge ruled Friday. The ruling came more than three weeks after masked immigration officials surrounded the 30-year-old doctoral student as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. An immigration judge denied her request for bond Wednesday, citing “danger and flight risk” as the rationale.