The federal government is appealing a judge’s ruling ordering the transfer of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student currently detained in Louisiana at an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, to a Vermont facility.

Federal Judge William K. Sessions III issued his ruling Friday in U.S. District Court in Burlington ordering that Öztürk, who is Turkish and was in the United States on a student visa, be transferred back to a Vermont facility by May 1.

The judge in that ruling also gave the parties in the case four days to seek an appeal of that order.

On Tuesday night, the federal government filed its notice of appeal.

The one-paragraph filing by acting U.S. Attorney of Vermont Michael Drescher, representing ICE and other federal agencies and officials in the case, stated the government was appealing to the 2nd U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals in New York. Drescher also asked for a continued stay of federal court proceedings in Vermont while that appeal was pending.

Drescher, in the filing for a stay, asked Sessions to rule on that motion no later than 3 p.m. Thursday, or he would be seeking “emergency relief” from the appeals court.

Sessions, in his order Friday, not only required the federal government to transfer Öztürk to a Vermont facility by May 1, but also set a bail hearing for May 9.

Drescher’s appeal notice stated the federal government was challenging Sessions’ ruling regarding whether he had jurisdiction in the case as well as his order that Öztürk “be physically transferred to ICE custody within the District of Vermont no later than May 1, 2025.”

Öztürk has been detained in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana since March 26. The doctoral student was taken into custody on a street not far from her apartment in Somerville Massachusetts, by masked officers in plainclothes.

She eventually was held overnight in Vermont at a St. Albans immigration facility before being taken aboard a flight at the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport and arriving at the Louisiana facility the next morning.

Öztürk’s attorneys have argued that she appears to have been wrongly targeted in violation of her free speech rights by federal immigration officers. Öztürk had co-authored an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper last year that called on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”

Drescher, reached Wednesday, declined comment on his notice of appeal and motion for a stay of further proceedings in Vermont.

Attorneys for Öztürk could not immediately be reached Wednesday for comment.