Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk has been released from an immigration detention center in rural Louisiana in response to an order from a federal judge. Öztürk’s arrest led to nationwide outrage after a chilling video showed plainclothes immigration agents in masks pulling her off the street in Massachusetts in March.

Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, has been accused of no criminal activity. Instead, the Trump administration has falsely claimed that she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” In reality, Öztürk co-wrote a op-ed for the Tufts Daily that pushed for divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk said outside the Louisiana immigration detention center on Friday. “I am a little tired so I will take some rest. But I really appreciate you being here.”

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD candidate whose sudden arrest by federal immigration agents made national headlines, walked out of a Louisiana detention facility after a judge ordered her release.

Watch the moment she spoke to supporters outside. https://t.co/rsttOeBNTz pic.twitter.com/KGd4zO1Q68

Welcome to Today in Books. In this weekend edition, a look at all the news Book Riot covered this week.

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On his first day in office, President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from around the world. In February, Trump made one exception—ordering the US government to promote refugee resettlement for white South Africans. Now, the first group of Afrikaners is set to arrive.

National Public Radio reports that a flight with 54 Afrikaners will arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, on Monday. In a highly unusual move, the administration plans to have high-level US officials meet the Afrikaners at the airport for a press conference, according to NPR. The administration is reportedly trying to charter a jet—presumably at US taxpayers’ expense—from Johannesburg to bring in the South Africans.

“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”

Timothy Young, a spokesman for Global Refuge, a resettlement agency, told the New York Times that thousands “of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan allies, religious minorities and other populations facing extreme violence and persecution.” The fact that the Trump administration is bypassing those people in favor of white South Africans who have not met international criteria for refugee status lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of its immigration policy.

This dispatch by Bill Shaner, an independent journalist who writes the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, was first published by Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

I’m driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there’s an ICE rendition ongoing. I’ve got the scanner on the car stereo as I’m about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: “We have an ICE officer over there who’s allegedly being surrounded.”

“On our way,” the officer responds. 

As a local reporter for a decade now, I’ve learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I’m hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city’s police chief told the city council in January:

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.  

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“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.” 

This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help. 

I read a lot of queer books, and I don’t always have an opportunity to talk about them on Our Queerest Shelves. So, I thought I’d give you an update of all the queer books I read last month. In April, that was eight titles, including graphic novels. Half of those I really enjoyed. A few weren’t 100% for me, but that’s just because they weren’t my particular taste. One, though, was the rare book I actually gave one star, and I feel extremely justified in that—in fact, I can’t believe it got published at all. Let’s get into it!

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This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Steps from a public bathroom, across a narrow street from a home goods store in Tokyo, Japan, a tangle of delicate reddish stems fringed with rubbery emerald leaves pokes from a crack in the pavement. Smaller than a discarded Big Mac box, the plant sprawls close to the ground, appearing entirely unremarkable. Put more plainly: Common purslane looks like a weed.

Purslane is so inconspicuous that when Tomohiro Fujita, a biologist at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies in Ibaraki, started studying it in August 2021, he had trouble picking it out in the bustling cityscape. “There were several times when I walked around Tokyo for an entire day without finding a single individual,” he wrote by email. But once he learned to recognize the plant, he found it in all kinds of places. Growing in a lush, tree-ringed quad outside a cafeteria at Rikkyo University, for instance. Or eking out a modest living near a city bus lot not far from Sugamo Station.

Common purslane, known to scientists as Portulaca oleracea, is not just big in Japan. By some counts, it’s the eighth most widely distributed plant in the world. As happy growing in gardens as along roads or parking lots, it has been documented everywhere from Mexico City to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean.

March 2 – May 11, 2025