Deportations

A federal judge in Vermont on Friday ordered that a Tufts University doctoral student be released on bail from ICE custody after her visa was revoked by the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions slammed the government in ordering Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish notional, released while their case against her proceeds, saying that the government had not produced any evidence against her aside from an op-ed she co-wrote in her student newspaper last year.

A federal judge granted bail to Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk on Friday, freeing her from federal immigration custody more than six weeks after the Trump administration revoked her visa and arrested her.

U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled that Öztürk raised substantial First Amendment and due process claims, saying the government had given no justification for detaining her other than a student newspaper op-ed she co-authored criticizing Tufts’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

An Iranian mechanical engineering student at the University of Alabama has decided to self-deport after six weeks in a Louisiana detention center despite the government dropping a charge behind his initial arrest, his lawyer and fiancee said.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to provide a full account of the legal basis for its attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate student whose case has become a political flashpoint over free speech and immigration enforcement.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration may deport migrants to Libya for the first time this week, three U.S. officials said on Tuesday, as part of his immigration crackdown and despite Washington's past condemnation of Libya's harsh treatment of detainees.

Two of the officials said the U.S. military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could still change.

A Harvard Medical School researcher currently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement says she should have reviewed customs protocols before attempting to enter the US with “non-hazardous” frog embryo samples but insists what she told immigration agents was misunderstood.

“I never provided false information to any government official,” Kseniia Petrova, a Russian national, said in a statement issued Thursday. “Some of my words were misunderstood and inaccurately reflected in the statement that the officer presented for my signature.”

The Trump administration has approached far-flung countries to aid its mass deportation effort, asking nations like Angola and Equatorial Guinea to accept migrants who are not their citizens, according to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News.

The talks are part of an intense diplomatic campaign by the Trump administration to convince as many nations as possible — including those with controversial human rights records — to receive deportees from the U.S., such as migrants whose home countries won't take them back. 

A federal judge on Friday declined to block the Trump administration from carrying out detention and deportation operations in houses of worship, finding that a coalition of more than two dozen religious organizations had not made a clear case that their spaces and congregants had become common targets.

The ruling stemmed from a lack of clarity about how President Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign has been carried out in practice since he took office...

The Trump administration this week continued digging in on its claim that symbols tattooed on the fingers of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a cross, a skull, a smiley face and a marijuana leaf – are proof that the man they wrongly deported to El Salvador is a member of MS-13.

But gang experts disagree, telling CNN that the tattoos alone are not proof of membership in the gang.

“I see a bunch of symbols that could be interpreted any number of ways,” Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has served as an expert gang witness in court, told CNN.

The wife of recently deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia told a court in 2020 that while the couple lived in Maryland she faced physical and verbal abuse from her husband on multiple occasions, the earliest known petition for protection from domestic violence filed against the illegal immigrant shows. 

The complaint was followed by a second petition, in 2021, by wife Jennifer Vasquez against her husband for alleged domestic abuse.