Court Tells Feds To Get Rümeysa Öztürk To Vermont For A Goddamn Hearing Already
Six weeks and the government is still fucking around with where she should've filed her Habeas petition.
A federal appeals court in New York ruled Wednesday that the federal government must stop fucking around and for fuckssake move Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk to Vermont so she can challenge her arrest and detention as her immigration case goes forward, Jesus Fuck.
In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, really digging his role as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation gestapo, cancelled her student visa and ordered her deported to Turkey because she co-authored a student newspaper editorial last year condemning Israel’s war in Gaza. That made her a “supporter” of Hamas, as far as the government was concerned, and therefore an Enemy of the State.
To get the message across that America under Trump doesn’t allow free speech wrongthink anymore, Öztürk was grabbed by masked ICE agents outside her Boston-area apartment, bundled into an unmarked car, and eventually sent to a private ICE prison in Louisiana where she remains today. Ever since, before she can even bring her immigration case to court, she’s been trying to get released on bail, but the feds have been fighting to keep her in Louisiana, presumably on the assumption that courts there — especially the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — are more fascism-friendly.
This is where we remind you yet again that the government hasn’t accused her of any crime, and that it insists it doesn’t have to because as Secretary of State, Rubio has sole “discretion” to revoke her visa and expel her for any reason, or no reason at all. Which does not explain sticking her in ICE jail for six weeks (so far), but nothing does.
In yesterday’s decision, following a hearing on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the administration’s request to keep holding Öztürk in Louisiana, reasoning that because she had been in Vermont at the time her attorneys filed her habeas corpus petition, that’s where her bail hearing should take place, according to any number of previous precedents. The court ordered the government to transfer her to Vermont by next Wednesday and to stop being such whiny tittybabies.
Öztürk’s attorneys had no idea where she’d been spirited off to after she was dragged off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25, so they filed the habeas petition that evening in Massachusetts. ICE had by that time taken her to Vermont, where she spent the night behind bars before being flown early the next morning to Louisiana. Because she was in Vermont when the petition was filed, that means the Vermont district has jurisdiction. The court rejected the idea that the bail hearing should take place in Louisiana, because no, she wasn’t yet in fucking Louisiana when the petition was filed, the case law is very fucking clear on this.
The government claimed that it would be too haaaaaaard to move her to Vermont for her bail hearing, but the judges yesterday said fuck you, because Öztürk’s “interest in participating in her scheduled habeas proceedings in person outweighs the government’s purported administrative and logistical costs.” And ALSO FUCK YOU it’s been six fucking WEEKS. (We are adding a bit of color to the official record.)
Again, none of the proceedings so far have addressed the real issue in Öztürk’s case so far, her contention that the government has no right to keep her locked up while her immigration case moves forward. Her attorney, Esha Bhandari of the ACLU, pointed out to the Second Circuit judges that detaining people while they appeal their visa status “is not the norm,” and argued that the “executive branch made a specific decision to detain Ms. Öztürk that was motivated by her speech.”
Even though that matter wasn’t at issue in Tuesday’s hearing — only the question of where the hearing should take place — one of the three judges on the appeals court, Circuit Judge Barrington Parker, asked the government’s attorney, Deputy AG Drew Ensign, whether the government concedes that the editorial Öztürk co-wrote is protected speech under the First Amendment.
“Your Honor, we have not taken a position on that,” Ensign replied.
“Help my thinking along, take a position,” Parker demanded.
“Your Honor, I don’t have the authority to take a position on that right now,” Ensign said.
So that was interesting, even if it had no bearing on yesterday’s ruling. Seems like something likely to show up once Öztürk finally gets her bail hearing, and in any subsequent developments in the case.
But first, the government will probably appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court while Öztürk remains imprisoned in Louisiana, where her attorneys say her asthma has gotten progressively worse the longer she stays behind bars. Here’s hoping she can breathe freely soon.
[NPR / Courthouse News Service / Order in Öztürk v. Hyde]
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The shit they’re pulling is so wildly illegal that even my cynical old ass is shocked. I just read Liz Dye’s new blog post about the Feds trying to dump some law-abiding guy from Vietnam in Yemen.
Fucking YEMEN.
"Öztürk was grabbed by masked ICE agents outside her Boston-area apartment, bundled into an unmarked car"
FFCS--if this happened to me, I would assume I was being abducted by rapists and I'd fight like hell...which would probably get me killed...
/FFCS