The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is “glad” that Rümeysa Öztürk, a former doctoral student at Tufts University, has “self-deported from the United States,” a spokesman for the agency told JNS.
“Visas provided to foreign students to live, study and work in the United States are a privilege, not a right,” the spokesman said.
Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the department, arrested Öztürk in March 2025. In January, an immigration judge in Boston ruled that the department did not meet its burden to show that she was removable. The Trump administration fired the immigration judge on April 10.
A U.S. Department of Justice official told JNS that “attending elite colleges and universities in the United States is a privilege afforded to foreign students, who respect our values and follow our laws.”
“Rümeysa Öztürk chose not to abide by those simple conditions, and as a result left the United States—something the administration sought to accomplish from the beginning,” the official told JNS. “We will continue to seek the deportation of any foreign student who abuses their opportunity to study in America by engaging in vile antisemitism, harassment or other illegal behavior.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Öztürk, stated on Friday that she had completed her doctoral studies at Tufts and that she returned to Turkey.
“The government’s retaliatory actions violated the Constitution, and having recourse to federal court was essential to secure her release and enable her to complete her Ph.D.,” stated Esha Bhandari, a project director at the ACLU. “We are grateful that she could make decisions about her future on her own terms.”
Öztürk co-authored a March 2024 op-ed in the Tufts Daily, a student newspaper, criticizing the private university’s “inadequate” response to resolutions that the student government passed, accusing Israel of “genocide” and calling on the university to divest from Israel.
The ACLU stated that it reached a settlement with the Trump administration in which Öztürk was free to return home, and the administration restored her student and exchange visitor information system record.
“The time stolen from me by the U.S. government belongs not just to me but to the children and youth I have dedicated my life to advocating for,” Öztürk stated. “With them in mind, I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States—all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights.”
