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Hamilton Spectator
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Hamilton Spectator
Turkish Tufts University student released from Louisiana immigration detention center
A Tufts University student from Turkey was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center Friday, more than six weeks after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb. U.S. District Judge William Sessions in Burlington ordered the release of Rumeysa Ozturk pending a final decision on her claim that she's been illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school's response to Israel's war in Gaza. A photo provided by her legal team showed her outside, smiling with her attorneys in Louisiana, where the immigration proceedings will continue. 'Despite an 11th hour attempt to delay her freedom by trying to force her to wear an ankle monitor, Rumeysa is now free and is excited to return home, free of monitoring or restriction,' attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said. Even before her release, Ozturk's supporters cheered the decision, punctuating an earlier news conference held by her attorneys with chants of 'She is free!' 'What we heard from the court today is what we have been saying for weeks, and what courts have continued to repeat up and down through the litigation of this case thus far,' Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, told reporters. 'There's absolutely no evidence that justifies detaining Ozturk for a single day, let alone the six and a half weeks that she has been detained, because she wrote a single op-ed in her student newspaper exercising her First Amendment right to express an opinion.' Appearing by video for her bail hearing, Ozturk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate degree focusing on children and social media while appearing remotely at her bail hearing from the Louisiana center. She and her lawyer hugged after hearing the judge's decision. 'Completing my Ph.D. is very important to me,' she testified. She had been on track to finish her work in December when she was arrested. Ozturk was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions, Sessions said. He said she is not a danger to the community or a flight risk, but that he might amend his release order to consider any specific conditions by ICE in consultation with her lawyers. Sessions said the government had offered no evidence about why Ozturk was arrested other than the op-ed. 'This is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career,' Sessions said. 'This is someone who probably doesn't have a whole lot of other things going on other than reaching out to other members of the community in a caring and compassionate way.' A message seeking comment was emailed Friday afternoon to the U.S. Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review. Sessions told Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher he wants to know immediately when she is released. Sessions said Ozturk raised serious concerns about her First Amendment and due process rights, as well as her health. She testified Friday that she has had 12 asthma attacks since her detention, starting with a severe one at the Atlanta airport. 'I was afraid, and I was crying,' she said. Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk in Massachusetts on March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said. Ozturk's lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont. Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university's response to student activists demanding that Tufts 'acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,' disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel. Ozturk said Friday that if she is released, Tufts would offer her housing and her lawyers and friends would drive her to future court hearings. She is expected to return to New England on Saturday at the earliest. 'I will follow all the rules,' she said. A State Department memo said Ozturk's visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions ''may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization' including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.' A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. 'When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?' Khanbabai asked. 'I am thankful that the courts have been ruling in favor of detained political prisoners, like Rumeysa.' ____ Associated Press writers Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, and Michael Casey in Boston, contributed to this report.
Boston Globe
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Make way for saints at Quincy's new public safety building?
However, regardless of the source of the funding, installing Catholic statues in a municipal building is intolerable. While Quincy has a large Catholic population, many of the city's residents are not Catholic, and the veneration of saints is anathema to adherents of a wide range of other beliefs. Confronted by monumental statues of St. Michael, patron saint of police officers, and St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, non-Catholics with business at the city's public safety building would have the question raised in their minds as to who these figures are and the reason for their presence. The answer would demand that they become familiar with Catholic doctrine and theology. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up It is to prevent such essentially forced sectarian encounters that the establishment clause of the Constitution was included in the founding document of our democracy. Advertisement If Mayor Koch cannot understand that the statues' presence contradicts and undermines the constitutions of both Massachusetts and the United States, our federal and state judges should make this clear to him. Martin Yaseen Brookline Mayor rightly argues that statues' symbolism transcends religion Mayor Thomas P. Koch of Quincy plans to have 10-foot tall statues of St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, and Saint Michael, patron saint of police officers, installed at the city's new public safety building. Criticizing the move, columnist Yvonne Abraham would concur with Rachel Davidson, a staff attorney and First Amendment specialist at the ACLU of Massachusetts, who says, 'Having two larger-than-life statues of Catholic saints, or any primarily religious figure, is the type of endorsement of religion that our state and federal constitutions prohibit.' Abraham then cites a statement from the city in which the mayor disagrees with the ACLU's characterization: 'As we've stated all along, the figures transcend religion and have a deep, long-held symbolic meaning of protection for our first responders. This is about them.' Advertisement If that straightforward explanation from the mayor does not satisfy Abraham and Davidson, then they should consider what Francis J. Hickey ll Lexington
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lawmakers, advocates push for remote public meetings
BOSTON (WWLP) – Since the onset of the pandemic, the public has been able to access town and state meetings via Zoom and other remote options. Late last week, lawmakers voted to extend the expiration date for these remote meetings. A COVID-era bill allowing public bodies to hold hybrid and remote meetings was supposed to expire at the end of this month, but lawmakers decided last Thursday to keep that option in place until late June 2027. Mass. Commission on the Status of Women gathers for State House Advocacy Day The bill also lowers the number of people required for a quorum for a town meeting and allows remote participation in representative town meetings. State and town leaders say remote options remove barriers like childcare and scheduling, and it's now the norm to offer Zoom or Teams meetings in addition to in-person access. Governor Healey offered an option to make remote access permanent in a municipal tax bill she filed in January, and a group of advocates released a statement saying they believe remote access should be mandatory. According to the advocacy groups, 'without the ability to participate remotely, people across the Commonwealth would be shut out from important public conversations about government decisions that directly impact their lives.' Groups include ACLU of Massachusetts, Boston Center for Independent Living, Common Cause Massachusetts, Disability Law Center, League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, and Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. These groups support a bill filed by a New Bedford Representative mandating remote access, but critics of the bills say that may not be a realistic expectation for the 10,000 board, committees, and commissions that this law would apply to. A similar bill has been filed by Ludlow Senator Jake Oliveira, although this bill supports a non-mandatory remote access option. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Boston Globe
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Saints preserve us
There, Mayor Thomas P. Koch has decreed that the city's massively expensive new public safety building will be adorned with two 10-foot-tall statues of saints venerated in his deeply-held Catholic faith. The effigies will be heroic, and ripped. They will also cost taxpayers $850,000. One will depict St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters, a caped colossus dousing the flames. The other huge figure will be a winged and muscular St. Michael, patron saint of police officers, with his foot on the neck of a horned figure in his death throes. According to statements by his chief of staff adornments all by himself. He certainly didn't tell anybody else, it appears, given that everybody in the city only found out about them after the Patriot Ledger How wrong is all of this? Where to start? Advertisement Maybe with the poor, battered federal Constitution, which, like our state's, mandates that the government must not promote any religion. 'Having two larger-than-life statues of Catholic saints, or any primarily religious figure, is the type of endorsement of religion that our state and federal constitutions prohibit,' said Rachel Davidson, a staff attorney and First Amendment specialist at the ACLU of Massachusetts, which In a statement, the city said the mayor disagrees with the ACLU's characterization of the statues. 'As we've stated all along, the figures transcend religion and have a deep, long-held symbolic meaning of protection for our first responders,' it continued. 'This is about them.' Is it, though? It's one thing for a police officer to choose to carry around a medal that her faith says will offer divine protection. It's entirely another to erect two giant effigies outside a public building that will be used by people of all faiths, or of no faith at all. Advertisement And then there is the design of the statue of St. Michael itself — a warrior standing over a demon-like figure, stepping on his neck. Tone-deaf doesn't even begin to describe the wrongness of that image in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd's neck for so long he died. City Councilor Dan Minton, a former member of the police force who served Quincy for decades, has called the image 'violent.' 'I don't want citizens to connect this statue with the way our Officers treat anyone,' Minton But good luck getting Koch to change his mind on this. The city's longest-serving mayor is rarely budged by public opposition. There was a notable exception last year, when he got himself a 79 percent pay raise, which would have boosted his salary from $150,000 to $285,000. After residents gathered more than 6,000 signatures for a recall petition he did agree A 'The fact that he believes he can authorize the enormous expense of these big, bombastic bronzes, with no discussion with the citizens or the City Council, that is offensive,' said Claire Fitzmaurice, who organized the petition. When a city councilor asked Koch's chief of staff what those who oppose the statues should do, he essentially told them to go pound sand. 'Wait for the beautiful public artwork to appear on these buildings and enjoy it with the rest of the public,' advised Chris Walker. 'The decision has been made.' Advertisement Does that kind of dismissive rhetoric remind you of anybody? Look, what we're seeing in Washington is a generational disaster, a constitutional crisis so monumental it's hard to see how we get out of it. But that doesn't mean we have to let this kind of anti-constitutional attitude creep into our local governments. We have to hold the line. Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at
