A federal judge in Vermont on Friday morning ordered the release on bail of a Tufts University student arrested in March for her political speech and now held in Louisiana in what she and her lawyers argue is a breach of her constitutional rights.

The judge had ordered Rümeysa Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.