BURLINGTON, Vermont - A Tufts University student from Turkey who was held for over six weeks in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana after co-writing an opinion piece criticising her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza was released from custody on May 9 after a federal judge granted her bail.

US District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, ordered the immediate release of Ms Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the centre of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.

The judge said Ms Ozturk, whose arrest in Massachusetts in March was captured in a viral video, had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was “simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.”

“Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” Mr Sessions said. “Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention centre.”

Ms Ozturk, who appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, could be seen hugging one of her attorneys after the judge ordered her release from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody.

She was released hours later, her legal team said.

The judge will take up arguments in her underlying lawsuit at a later hearing.

“We are so relieved that Rumeysa will soon be back in Massachusetts, and won’t stop fighting until she is free for good,” Ms Jessie Rossman, a lawyer for Ms Ozturk at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said in a statement.

Massachusetts-based Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ms Ozturk housing upon her release.

In a statement, a university spokesperson said it hoped she would be able to rejoin its community as soon as possible to resume her doctoral studies.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the judge’s ruling another sign of what he considers a “judicial coup” in the United States.

Several parts of the president’s hardline immigration agenda have been blocked...