BOSTON — Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk’s record in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS. The preliminary injunction says immigration authorities likely acted unlawfully when they terminated the Turkish scholar’s status in March, a move that also barred her from critical paid work on campus, Dec. 8, 2025.
SEVIS, the database at the center of the case, is maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track international students and verify that they remain in full-time study; when a student’s record is terminated, they lose eligibility for campus jobs, research assistantships and other training built into their visas, according to court filings and a detailed legal report by Reuters and a new ACLU press release on Rumeysa Ozturk’s case.
In that release, Rumeysa Ozturk framed the government’s cancellation of her record as retaliation for her writing about Gaza and said the court’s decision “gives me hope” that others will not endure similar injustices, even as she stressed that lost research and teaching opportunities cannot be restored. She also described the weeks she spent in a private ICE detention center in Louisiana as a period of “brutality” that deepened her solidarity with others whose education had been disrupted.
The injunction is the latest turn in a case that began March 25, when masked federal agents pulled Rumeysa Ozturk off a Somerville street as she headed to an iftar dinner, revoking the 30-year-old Turkish national’s F-1 visa and flying her to a detention center in Louisiana before local attorneys and a federal judge in Massachusetts could intervene. Local TV station WCVB and other outlets have documented how video of the arrest spread widely online, fueling protests and deep anxiety among international students in the Boston area.
Tufts University publicly backed her within days, filing a sworn declaration that confirmed Rumeysa Ozturk had been in “good immigration standing” in SEVIS at the time of her arrest and that the op-ed she co-authored in The Tufts Daily did not violate any campus policies, according to a statement from university president Sunil Kumar posted on Tufts’ website. A separate investigation, described in an April report by The Washington Post, found that a State Department office saw no evidence linking her to antisemitism or terrorism, even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio used broad discretionary authority to revoke her visa amid a wider crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists.
After six weeks behind bars, Rumeysa Ozturk won release this spring when a federal judge in Vermont ruled that her detention likely violated her First Amendment rights. An appeals court later ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to return her to New England so she could attend hearings in person, according to an earlier AP News report. Those rulings did not restore her broken SEVIS record, leaving her free to continue studying in Massachusetts but unable to teach, conduct funded research with children and media, or earn income that had been central to her scholarly career.
Why the SEVIS ruling for Rumeysa Ozturk matters beyond Tufts
In a Dec. 5 hearing in Casper’s courtroom, described by local NPR station WBUR, attorneys argued that each day Rumeysa Ozturk’s SEVIS record stayed terminated deepened the harm to her speech rights and kept her from doing the work she loves as a researcher and teacher. Advocates say the ruling now allows Rumeysa Ozturk to pursue paid research on children’s engagement with media and to regain teaching roles that are central to her professional future in academia.
Casper’s order is a preliminary injunction, meaning the Trump administration can still appeal, and the broader lawsuit — which challenges the legality of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest, detention, and visa revocation — will continue in federal courts in Vermont and Massachusetts. For now, though, the ruling allows Rumeysa Ozturk to reapply for campus employment, reconnect with the child-development projects that first brought her to Tufts, and, as Turkish news agency Anadolu and the Boston Globe note, sends a signal to other international students that the courts remain a venue to test the administration’s increasingly aggressive use of immigration powers.
