Bulwark Takes - Trump Defeated! Detained Student Freed After Court Order!

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

A recent federal appeals court ruling has mandated that the Trump administration transfer Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, from an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Bulwark. I'm JVL here with my colleague, Ben Parker. We've got great news, big news. Ramesa Ozturk, who is the graduate student from Tufts who was snatched off the street by masked and unidentified ICE officers and whipped off to prison. A judge has just ruled that she must have bail and be released. Ben, this is one of those small victories that feels like a huge one. Yeah, it does. You know, it'll be great if we actually see her, partially because she's still in Louisiana. She was arrested in New England, right in Boston or in Cambridge or Metro Boston.

Somerset. Somerset. Somerset. In Somerset, where she was a student and, of course, whisked off a thousand miles away to Louisiana, as in so many of these cases the Trump administration has done. So she was just testifying

in her bail hearing by Zoom from Louisiana. The judge suggested in his order that she has to be released. Does that mean they have to bring her home? I don't know. But hopefully she'll see the sun soon. Well, this is yeah so this is what's what's going on here i want to set the stage here for people a little bit the government has fought every single aspect of this for no

reason so i mean let's just start from the beginning right so uh oz turk has her her legal status revoked personally by Marco Rubio. Instead of informing her that her legal status has changed and telling her that, you know, the government expects her to leave the country within X number of days, which would be something normal you would do for somebody who is not a criminal, hasn't done anything wrong, is you know she's the middle of a phd program right yeah she's not it's not like she's gonna go underground you know she's not gonna go on the lam um what are they the flea right right well for flight risk yeah um instead they go and they they use a lot of manpower to stake out her apartment and snatch her off the street, which, by the way, is dangerous. Entirely possible the agents themselves could have been shot if a passerby, a good Samaritan, thought that there was a kidnapping going underway. The government, you know, then moves her to Louisiana. Her lawyers say, no, bring her back to Vermont. Bring her to the Vermont detention facility. The government opp you know, her then moves her to Louisiana. Her lawyers say, no, bring her back to Vermont.

Bring her to the Vermont detention facility. The government opposes that. They lose. The order comes through that they have to bring her back to Vermont. Her attorneys are filing habeas to get bail for her. The government opposes that. There's no reason for the government to oppose bail. And the argument the government made today in court was that they said, Your Honor, it's primarily just a legal argument. We just don't think that this is the appropriate

court to make the decision on bail. And we don't think that you, Your Honor, are the judge who gets to make that decision, which is, again, just bullshit. Yeah, I'm not a lawyer, but that strikes me as the kind of argument you make when you don't have any other argument to make. I have no other argument to make. And this is what's really interesting. So the requirements for bail in this, you have to meet two of three requirements. And this is according to the controlling law on this is MAP. According to MAP, which is the controlling doctrine on this, you need to find three factors. Substantial claims, so a substantial claim that the rights are being infringed upon. Two, extraordinary circumstances, meaning that

something out of the ordinary is happening. And three, that the bail is necessary to make the habeas appeal effective. And the judge ruled that Ahaz Turk had satisfied all three of these. The substantial claims are that she has a substantial First Amendment claim here that the government has simply said she she co-authored this one op ed and we don't like it. Number two, these shortening circumstances. She has asthma. They presented evidence and witnesses to she has long suffered from asthma and that it's gotten worse while she's cooped up in jail without ventilation. And third, that is necessary to make habeas a fact of. And Joe's like, yes, obviously. But I want to say something here, because as I'm looking through and we don't have a

written order yet. What we have is we have great reporting from Anna Bauer of Lawfare. If you're not following Lawfare, go do it. If you're not following Anna, go follow her. She does great work. And she, I believe, is in the courtroom sort of getting this all out to us in real time. And one of the things that the judge said a bunch of times in conclusion was that these are substantial First Amendment and due process violations. Yes. And that the government had been invited over and over again to submit any sort of evidence that it had anything else other than the student paper op ed that they didn't like.

And the government declined to do so. And there's even a moment where the judge says, you know, you guys were ordered not to do some of this stuff. You guys mean the government. And you did it anyway. And I'm not sure if you knew about it or if you acted in good faith. But these are extraordinary circumstances. And again, it feels like we are at the end of regular order in the justice system here, where judges are realizing that because lawyers from the government say something, you can't trust that it's true.

So that is a huge part of it. There are two other huge implications to this case that I want to talk through. One of them is you have written about the sort of calculus that John Roberts has to make. He issues a ruling that says Trump must do something or can't do something. And Trump doesn't follow it. What happens? And I find it kind of interesting that a lot of these lower court judges, maybe because they have the Supreme Court at the backstop, don't care. He's saying, no, you've got to release her. And maybe he's assuming that there will be political consequences if Trump defies a court

order. There's been polling to suggest that's true. Maybe he figures it's not my job. You know, I just I just say what the law is and I issue orders. And, you know, the rest of it is out of my hands, which I think is actually sort of a perfectly reasonable tact for judges to take. Right. That's their job. But it's great to see these judges all over the country, including some Republican appointees, Trump appointees, just saying, no, you've got to follow the law like it's as simple as that. You've got to follow the law. Do it. And daring Trump to do the opposite. I mean, we'll see how it turns out. The other thing, and you talked about this a little bit already, is the reason that so purportedly, I mean, the real, the real reason she was arrested in the first place is because she wrote an op ed in a student newspaper. The First Amendment is not limited to citizens.

She has First Amendment rights. Yes. And the government cannot just pick her up off the street because she said something it didn't like. I mean, that is, I don't think that is a controversial legal interpretation. The First Amendment doesn't refer to citizens. It applies to all people in the United States. And the thing she said wasn't threatening. It wasn't violent.

It didn't call for the overthrow of the government. It was just expressing opinions about a policy of a different government that isn't the United States. And she was arrested for that. I mean, this should be so clear cut and obvious. So earlier this week, we got a ruling in, not a ruling, we got a filing in one of the circuit courts on this case in which the judge said to the government, all right, you say that it's entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of State who revoked people's status personally with the actual filings on it and the evidence related to it. And I'd like to have a look at that. Because that's the world we live in. Like this in, you know, the government says this stuff.

You just have to go. And here I want to I want to somebody was talking about this the other day and I don't remember who it was. It might've been John Bolton of all people. But you have to understand when you are a lawyer for the government, your client is the United States constitution. Your client isn't the department of justice. Your client isn't even the president. It's the Constitution. It's the rule of law. You are not there to play games to win at all costs. on anything in this garbage case that, that your department is saddled with defending.

And yet, as we've seen with, you know, like the Abrego Garcia case and what the, what Pam Bondi did to the DOJ attorney who admitted in court that they, they messed up. That's what it turned like. The, That's what it turned like the the government's attorneys are acting like the lowest level shysters and game playing lawyers that you see, you know, in the worst parts of the legal system. And they're doing that because that's what the attorney general and the attorney general's client. Ah, you see what I did there?

Demand that they do. And it's nice to see the judges at the trial level and the district level say, no, stop this. There is well-established Supreme Court precedent that you cannot deport someone for A, exercising their First Amendment rights, and B, without some sort of process. Now, Trump likes to pretend that this means a full

jury trial, which is ridiculous for so many reasons. I mean, even criminal charges, the facts majority of the time don't go to jury trial, right? All we're talking about is a hearing. And, you know, if you're serious about the Constitution, you cannot deprive someone of their liberty without due process. And that's exactly what happened to Rameza Ozturk. And the best argument the government has is, well, we want a different court to decide, which is kind of nothing because they have no argument. Now, here's the threat, which is if the entire government is so poorly lawyered that the courts keep telling them to stop doing what they're doing. No, you can't do that. No, you don't have a good reason. No, you didn't present us the documents. No, you didn't

cross all your T's and dot all your I's. It does, you know, it doesn't implicate whether or not the courts are going to be obeyed. But also, it would probably be better if this administration were like really, really well lawyered. And in some places it is. But so far, I don't know, doesn't seem like they're really outsmarting, of course. So I just want to look over the horizon here, because at some point, I believe the court system will wind up in the position, and it might be in a civil trial after the fact, for all I know. I don't have any inside information here. Rameza Ozturk's name did not come to Marco Rubio through a Google search that he was doing. The secretary of state was not sitting around reading through the Tufts student paper and highlighting things that he thought were like threats to national security.

Somebody compiled a list of names of people they wanted to be targeted by the United States government and handed that to somebody inside the United States government to then use the power of the federal government to carry out their vendetta. Is it? I will be very interested to see who the person or persons who put Oz Turk's name on that list were and whether or not that is legally, whether or not that is very legal and very cool, because I don't know. I mean,

that might be one of those things. I don't know, but my inkling is it's one of those things. I don't know. But my inkling is it's one of those things where there's no rule against it because no one's ever done it before. I mean, we'll see. At some point, we're going to see. If you guys are waiting for that shoe to drop, ride with us. Hit like, hit subscribe, follow the bulwark. Everything is still terrible, but the little wins are starting to pile up one brick at a time.

And I think we're going to be able to build something out of this. Good luck, America.