A federal judge in Boston has ordered immigration authorities to restore Rümeysa Öztürk's student record, unwinding one more piece of the government's campaign against the Tufts doctoral student who was taken off a Somerville street by masked agents over an op-ed.
Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper granted a preliminary injunction requiring ICE to reinstate Öztürk's record in SEVIS — the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, the database the government and universities treat as the "definitive record" of a foreign student's status. Judge Casper found Öztürk likely to succeed in proving that ICE terminated the record unlawfully, and noted the government's "shifting justifications" for why it had been terminated at all.
The database entry sounds bureaucratic. Its absence was not. With her SEVIS record terminated, Öztürk could study at Tufts but could not hold any of the paid positions a doctoral program is built on — teaching sections, research appointments, the campus work that funds a Ph.D. and constitutes its training. The termination functioned as a quiet, ongoing punishment that outlasted her physical detention: released from the cell, still locked out of her own program. Judge Casper's order is aimed exactly at that continuing harm.
How she got here
Öztürk's case became one of the defining images of the 2025 crackdown. In March, plainclothes officers surrounded the Turkish doctoral student on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts and took her into custody — an arrest captured on video that circulated worldwide. The State Department had revoked her visa; the only basis authorities ever identified was an op-ed she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper the previous year criticizing the university's response to Israel's war in Gaza.
She spent 45 days in a Louisiana detention center before a federal judge in Vermont ordered her released, finding she had raised a substantial claim that the detention was retaliation for speech the First Amendment protects. She returned to Tufts and resumed her studies. The SEVIS termination was what remained — until now.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling, and the underlying litigation over the legality of the government's actions continues. Appeals are possible. But the arc of the case so far is hard to miss: at every stage where the government has been required to explain itself to a judge — the detention, the retaliation claim, now the student record — its position has failed. What survives each round is Öztürk herself, still enrolled, still writing, and now able to work again.
