A federal judge on Thursday said she was "struggling" to understand why President Donald Trump's administration is preventing a Tufts University PhD student who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism from working on campus nearly seven months after the Turkish citizen was released from an immigration detention center. Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper during a hearing in Boston questioned whether U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acted arbitrarily when it terminated Rumeysa Ozturk's status in a key database used to track foreign students after she co-wrote an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper criticizing her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.

"What's the rationale for allowing the agency to have the discretion to terminate the record?" Casper asked. Ozturk

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