Immigration

Rumeysa Ozturk returned to Massachusetts on Saturday evening, eyes welling with joy and gratitude at the end of her six-week odyssey in federal custody, a case that stirred outrage over President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

A flight carrying Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen studying at Tufts University on a student visa, touched down at Boston Logan International Airport one day after a federal judge in Vermont ordered that she be immediately released from a detention facility in Louisiana.

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Vermont on Friday ordered that a Tufts University doctoral student be released on bail from ICE custody after her visa was revoked by the Trump administration.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

The Trump administration is working to bring the first group of white South Africans it has classified as refugees to the United States early next week, according to officials briefed on the plans and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Although the president halted virtually all other refugee admissions shortly after he took office in January, his administration hastily put together a program to allow in white South Africans, who he claims have been the victims of racial persecution in their home country.

The United States is working to bring the first group of white South Africans it has classified as refugees to the country early next week, The New York Times reported on Friday, citing officials briefed on the plans and documents obtained by the newspaper.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration plans to send officials to the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia for an event marking the arrival of the South Africans, who belong to the white minority Afrikaner ethnic group, NYT said, citing a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services.

 The U.S. government has officially granted 54 Afrikaans South Africans, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers, refugee status and they are expected to land in the U.S. on Monday May 12, three sources with knowledge of the matter have told NPR. The sources did not want to be named because they work for the U.S. government and fear for their careers.

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions of his new term was to halt the arrival of all refugees coming into the United States. Yet there’s one group he’s made a point of welcoming: the white South Africans known as Afrikaners.

“Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account last month.

The U.S. and South African groups have started to take action to "improve" the lives of Afrikaners, descendants of white, mostly Dutch settlers, after President Donald Trump said they could settle in the U.S. as refugees. 

On Friday, President Trump lashed out again against the South African government for its treatment of farmers, many, but not all of whom, are Afrikaners, positing on his Truth Social media platform via X, "they are taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families."

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.

The Trump administration invoked the state secrets privilege Wednesday to avoid handing over documents in the legal battle over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, court records show.