A federal judge just freed Rümeysa Öztürk from ICE detention. But the Trump administration isn’t backing down.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2025.

The Trump administration remains delusionally committed to its abuse of executive power, doubling down on threats to Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk after a federal judge ordered her release on Friday.

In March, Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student on a Fulbright scholarship, was disappeared from the Boston area by masked, plainclothes ICE agents after she wrote an op-ed that called for Tufts to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine and to divest from Israel. Her release—after six weeks in ICE detention—is a direct rebuke of the Trump administration’s actions, as was the release of Palestinian student activist Mohsen Mahdawi last month.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was tasked with answering for the Trump administration’s legal loss.

“Does the administration have any response to the news today that a federal judge has ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk from detention?” a reporter asked Leavitt on Friday afternoon. “Particularly his comments that the government submitted no evidence other than an op-ed that Öztürk wrote last year?”

Leavitt defaulted to one of her go-to answers: It’s the judges who are crazy.

“I think our overall feeling—we’ve made quite clear lower level judges should not be dictating the foreign policy of the United States, and we absolutely believe that the president and the Department of Homeland Security are well within their legal rights to deport illegal immigrants,” Leavitt replied. “As for visa revocations, the secretary of state has the right to do that as well. It is a privilege not a right to come to this country on a visa.”

This is one of many examples of the Trump administration only considering the courts valid when they agree with the rulings they make. Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his child while being detained in Louisiana, and Georgetown student Badar Khan Suri, who is now held in a Texas detention center, are still in custody.