BOSTON (AP) — 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 criticizing 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.
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FILE - Tufts University student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested by immigration agents while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, talks to reporters on arriving back in Boston, May 10, 2025, a day after she was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center on the orders of a federal judge. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
Öztürk has been out of a Louisiana immigrant detention center since May and back on the Tufts campus. But she's 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 Monday, Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that 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 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 Tuesday seeking comment from Sauter on whether the government plans to appeal.
In a statement, 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 criminalize and punish those whose opinions differ from our own,” said 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 criticized 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.
Öztürk, who is Muslim, was meeting friends in March for iftar, a meal that breaks a fast at sunset during Ramadan, according to her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said. The government asserted that terminating her SEVIS record two hours after her arrest was a proper way of informing Tufts University about her visa revocation.
A State Department memo said Öztürk's visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions “‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”
Without her SEVIS status reinstated, Öztürk said she couldn't qualify as a paid research assistant and couldn't fully reintegrate into academic life at Tufts.
“We have a strange kind of legal gaslighting here, where the government claims it’s just a tinkering in a database, but this is really something that has a daily impact on Ms. Öztürk’s life,” her attorney, Adriana Lafaille of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in court.
“We are running out of time to make this right. Each day that goes by is a day that she is being prevented from doing the work that she loves in the graduate program that she came here to be part of. Each day that this happens is a day that the government is allowed to continue to punish her for her protected speech.”
Öztürk, meanwhile, has maintained a full course load and fulfilled all requirements to maintain her lawful student status, which the government hasn't terminated, her lawyer said.
SEVIS is mandated by Congress in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and administered by the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement “to collect information relating to nonimmigrant foreign students” and “use such information to carry out the enforcement functions of” ICE.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, when a SEVIS record is terminated, a student loses all on and/ or off-campus employment authorization and allows ICE agents to investigate to “confirm the departure of the student.”
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McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire.
FILE - Tufts University student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested by immigration agents while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, talks to reporters on arriving back in Boston, May 10, 2025, a day after she was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center on the orders of a federal judge. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk reads from a prepared statement following a court hearing outside the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Boston. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Not long after President Donald Trump took office in January, staff at CentroNía bilingual preschool began rehearsing what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came to the door. As ICE became a regular presence in their historically Latino neighborhood this summer, teachers stopped taking children to nearby parks, libraries and playgrounds that had once been considered an extension of the classroom.
And in October, the school scrapped its beloved Hispanic Heritage Month parade, when immigrant parents typically dressed their children in costumes and soccer jerseys from their home countries. ICE had begun stopping staff members, all of whom have legal status, and school officials worried about drawing more unwelcome attention.
All of this transpired before ICE officials arrested a teacher inside a Spanish immersion preschool in Chicago in October. The event left immigrants who work in child care, along with the families who rely on them, feeling frightened and vulnerable.
Trump’s push for the largest mass deportation in history has had an outsized impact on the child care field, which is heavily reliant on immigrants and already strained by a worker shortage. Immigrant child care workers and preschool teachers, the majority of whom are working and living in the U.S. legally, say they are wracked by anxiety over possible encounters with ICE officials. Some have left the field, and others have been forced out by changes to immigration policy.
At CentroNía, CEO Myrna Peralta said all staff must have legal status and work authorization. But ICE's presence and the fear it generates have changed how the school operates.
“That really dominates all of our decision making,” Peralta said.
Instead of taking children on walks through the neighborhood, staff members push children on strollers around the hallways. And staff converted a classroom into a miniature library when the school scrapped a partnership with a local library.
Schools and child care centers were once off limits to ICE officials, in part to keep children out of harm’s way. But those rules were scrapped not long after Trump's inauguration. Instead, ICE officials are urged to exercise “common sense.”
Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, defended ICE officials' decision to enter the Chicago preschool. She said the teacher, who had a work permit and was later released, was a passenger in a car that was being pursued by ICE officials. She got out of the car and ran into the preschool, McLaughlin said, emphasizing the teacher was “arrested in the vestibule, not in the school.” The man who had been driving went inside the preschool, where officials arrested him.
About one-fifth of America’s child care workers were born outside the United States and one-fifth are Latino. The proportion of immigrants in some places, particularly large cities, is much higher: In the District of Columbia, California and New York, around 40% of the child care workforce is foreign-born, according to UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.
Immigrants in the field tend to be better educated than those born in the United States. Those from Latin America help satisfy the growing demand for Spanish-language preschools, such as CentroNía, where some parents enroll their kids to give them a head start learning another language.
The American Immigration Council estimated in 2021 that more than three-quarters of immigrants working in early care and education were living and working in the U.S. legally. Preschools like CentroNía conduct rigorous background checks, including verifying employees have work authorization.
Beyond the deportation efforts, the Trump administration in recent months has stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Many of them had fled violence, poverty or natural disasters in their homes and received Temporary Protected Status, which allowed them to live and work legally in the U.S. But Trump ended those programs, forcing many out of their jobs — and the country. Just last month, 300,000 immigrants from Venezuela lost their protected status.
CentroNía lost two employees when they lost their TPS, Peralta said, and a Nicaraguan immigrant working as a teacher left on his own. Tierra Encantada, which runs Spanish immersion preschools in several states, had a dozen teachers leave when they lost their TPS.
At CentroNía, one staff member was detained by ICE while walking down the street and held for several hours, all the while unable to contact colleagues to let them know where she was. She was released that evening, said the school's site director, Joangelee Hernández-Figueroa.
Another staff member, teacher Edelmira Kitchen, said she was pulled over by ICE on her way to work in September. Officials demanded she get out of her car so they could question her. Kitchen, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child, said she refused and they eventually let her go.
“I felt violated of my rights," Kitchen said.
Hernández-Figueroa said ICE's heightened presence during the federal intervention in the city has taken a toll on employees' mental health. Some have gone to the hospital with panic attacks in the middle of the school day.
When the city sent mental health consultants to the school earlier this year as part of a partnership with the Department of Behavioral Health, school leadership had them work with teachers rather than students, worried their anguish would spill over to the classroom.
“If the teachers aren't good,” Hernández-Figueroa said, “the kids won't be good either.”
It's not just adults who are feeling more anxious. At a Guidepost Montessori School in Portland, Oregon, teachers observed preschoolers change in the weeks after an ICE arrest near the school in July. After pulling over a father who was driving his child to the school, officials encountered him in the school parking lot and tried to arrest him. In the ensuing commotion, the school went into lockdown: Children were pulled off the playground, and teachers played loud music and had children sing along to drown out the yelling.
Amy Lomanto, who heads the school, said teachers noticed more outbursts among students, and more students retreating to what the school calls “the regulation station,” an area in the main office with fidget toys kids can use to calm themselves.
She said what unfolded at her school underscored that even wealthy communities, like the one the school serves, are not immune from exposure to these kinds of events.
“With the current situation, more and more of us are likely to experience this kind of trauma,” she said. “That level of fear now is permeating a lot more throughout our society.”
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Celenia Romero reads to her Prek-5 students as they play in the library at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Edelmira Kitchen, a teaching artist at CentroNia, poses for a portrait in a classroom at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Celenia Romero reads to her Prek-5 students in the library at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Edelmira Kitchen, a teaching artist at CentroNia, poses for a portrait in a classroom at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Celenia Romero reads to her Prek-5 students in the library at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Belkis Mendez, builds with a Prek-5 student during playtime in their classroom at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Flor Perez encourages her class of 2-year-olds in a walk around the school in lieu of outdoor walks around the neighborhood during school time at CentroNia in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Families leave CentroNia at the end of the school day in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
