This afternoon, a federal judge in Vermont ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk be released from ICE custody immediately.

Rümeysa Öztürk is the Tufts PhD student who, in late March, was apprehended by masked, plainclothed ICE agents while she was walking down the street outside of Boston, talking to her mom on the phone. She was put into a vehicle, shuffled around New England, and eventually put on a plane to Louisiana where she’s been held in a detention center the ACLU calls the Black Hole.

No charge has been filed against her. The only apparent reason she’s been held is this op-ed she co-authored last year in the Tufts Daily, the campus newspaper, calling on her university to acknowledge Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide and to divest from Israel.

We ran a live episode about Rümeysa on our show last week, and dove into the intense chilling effect her detention has had on student journalists across the country.

DHS has claimed, without substantiating it, that Rümeysa’s associations “may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

But the Tufts Daily is reporting this afternoon:

[U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III] said in the hearing that since the administration had not presented any evidence for her detainment aside from the op-ed she co-authored last year, there was no merit to their claim that she was engaging in violent activity.

The judge said, other than the op-ed, “There is no evidence here.”

Rümeysa testified remotely at her hearing, talking about the difficult conditions of her detention and the multiple asthma attacks she’s suffered since being locked up. Here is one of Rümeysa’s lawyers speaking after the hearing.

Senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, Mike Hiestand, who has been fielding an unprecedented number of inquiries from student journalists since Rümeysa’s abduction, and who I interviewed for our episode last week, said this after watching today’s proceedings:

“Today’s hearing was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Like me, the judge cannot believe this is happening in America. A student here lawfully was taken off a city street by masked, plainclothes government agents and flown to a detention facility a thousand miles away solely — SOLELY — because of the lawful opinions she expressed in an op-ed published in a student newspaper. Today’s ruling is a victory for free speech, but the chilling effect of the government’s actions are serious and long-lasting.”

We’ve reached out to one of Rümeysa’s attorneys to find out when exactly Rümeysa will be set free, but it’s not clear right now. We’ll keep you updated if we learn more important info. In the meantime, I’m still trying to get Marco Rubio to sit for an interview with Tufts Daily reporters.

Brian