BOSTON: A Tufts University graduate who was arrested by US immigration agents last year as part of the targeting by President Donald Trump’s administration of pro-Palestinian campus activists has returned to her home in Turkiye following a settlement.

Lawyers for Rumeysa Ozturk announced the accord on Friday, a week after the Trump administration fired an immigration judge who had in January rejected the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to deport her. The administration had been appealing that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the Justice Department.

It also was awaiting a ruling by a federal appeals court in its bid to overturn another judge’s decision that led to Ozturk’s release from immigration custody in May last year.

Friday’s settlement resolved all of the legal proceedings, her attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union said, and let Ozturk return to Turkiye unhindered after completing her PhD programme in child study and human development in February at Tufts, in Massachusetts.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa to the United States was an editorial she co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper in 2024 criticising the university’s response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“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,” Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, said in a statement.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement it was “glad to see Ozturk self-deported from the US”.

It said visas that allow foreign students to study and work in the United States “are a privilege, not a right”.

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2026