FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Emily Hagan-Howe, Communications Director, ACLU of Vermont; 802-223-6304 x121, [email protected]
Burlington, VT – Vermont district court Judge William K. Sessions III will hear oral arguments regarding Rümeysa Öztürk’s habeas petition on Monday, April 14th at 9:30 AM in the U.S. District Court building located at 11 Elmwood Ave in Burlington. Information about how to access the hearing remotely is included below.
Attorneys representing Ms. Öztürk have asked Judge Sessions to affirm that the Vermont district court is the appropriate venue to hear this case, and to order that she be immediately released from the ICE detention facility in Louisiana where she has been held since late March. Ms. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and current Ph.D. student at Tufts University, was grabbed, arrested, and detained by plainclothes federal agents in Somerville, MA on March 25 in apparent retaliation for an op-ed she co-authored in a student newspaper last spring.
For nearly 24 hours, her attorney was unable to locate her as ICE agents moved Ms. Öztürk from Somerville to Methuen, MA; then, to Lebanon, NH; and finally, to St. Albans, VT, where she was held in a detention cell overnight before being put on an early morning flight from Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to Louisiana the next day. Ms. Öztürk has remained imprisoned in Basile, LA for over two weeks.
Copies of the most recent filings in this case are available here.
The ACLU of Vermont joins Mahsa Khanbabai, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Massachusetts, CLEAR, and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP in representing Ms. Öztürk.
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