NEW YORK: A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday in the cases of a Turkish Tufts University student who has been detained by immigration authorities for six weeks and a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was recently released from detention.
A three-judge panel of the US 2nd Circurt Court of Appeals, based in New York, is expected to hear motions filed by the US Justice Department regarding Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. The department is appealing decisions made by two federal judges in Vermont. It also wants to consolidate the students’ cases, saying they present similar legal questions.
Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately.
A district court judge in Vermont had ordered that Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student, be brought to the state from a Louisiana immigration detention center by May 1 for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.
The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion.
Congress limited federal-court jurisdiction over immigration matters, the Justice Department said. It said an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over Ozturk’s case.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to the detention center in Basile, Louisiana.
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
The government is also challenging another judge’s decision to release Mahdawi from detention in Vermont on April 30. Mahdawi led protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. He was arrested by immigration officials during an interview about finalizing his US citizenship.
Mahdawi, 34, has been a legal permanent resident for 10 years. He was in a Vermont state prison since April 14. In his release order, US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford said Mahdawi has raised a “substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.”
Mahdawi’s release allows him to travel outside his home state of Vermont and attend graduation next month in New York. He recently completed coursework at Columbia and planned to begin a master’s degree program there in the fall.
Appeals court to hear cases of 2 university students, one detained, the other recently released
https://arab.news/4wfjq
Appeals court to hear cases of 2 university students, one detained, the other recently released
- Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately
- The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion
Russia says foreign forces in Ukraine would be ‘legitimate targets’
- Moscow has repeatedly said it will not tolerate the presence in Ukraine of troops from Western countries
MOSCOW: Russia would regard the deployment of any foreign military forces or infrastructure in Ukraine as foreign intervention and treat those forces as legitimate targets, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday, citing Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The ministry’s comment, one of many it said were in response to questions put to Lavrov, also praised US President Donald Trump’s efforts at working for a resolution of the war and said he understood the fundamental reasons behind the conflict.
“The deployment of military units, facilities, warehouses, and other infrastructure of Western countries in Ukraine is unacceptable to us and will be regarded as foreign intervention posing a direct threat to Russia’s security,” the ministry said on its website.
It said Western countries — which have discussed a possible deployment to Ukraine to help secure any peace deal — had to understand “that all foreign military contingents, including German ones, if deployed in Ukraine, will become legitimate targets for the Russian Armed Forces.”
The United States has spearheaded efforts to hold talks aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraine and a second three-sided meeting with Russian and Ukrainian representatives is to take place this week in the United Arab Emirates.
The issue of ceding internationally recognized Ukrainian territory to Russia remains a major stumbling block. Kyiv rejects Russian calls for it to give up all of its Donbas region, including territory Moscow’s forces have not captured.
Moscow has repeatedly said it will not tolerate the presence in Ukraine of troops from Western countries.
The ministry said Moscow valued the “purposeful efforts” of the Trump administration in working toward a resolution and understanding Russia’s long-running concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion and its overtures to Ukraine.
It described Trump as “one of the few Western politicians who not only immediately refused to advance meaningless and destructive preconditions for starting a substantive dialogue with Moscow on the Ukrainian crisis, but also publicly spoke about its root causes.”
