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Russia marked the 80th anniversary of its victory over Nazi Germany with a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square, attended by over 20 foreign leaders. The Victory Day spectacle, celebrated on May 9, is Russia’s most important secular holiday.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student detained as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine visa holders, has been ordered to be released from immigration custody.

On Friday, Vermont-based US District Judge William Sessions ruled that Ozturk’s “detention cannot stand”.

“The court finds that she does not pose a danger to the community, nor does she present a risk of flight. The court orders the government to release Ms Ozturk from custody immediately,” Sessions said.

Lawyers for Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the US on a student visa, had argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport her violated her constitutional rights, including to free speech and due process.

Sessions appeared to side with the legal team’s argument, saying Ozturk’s “continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens”.

Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said in a statement she was “relieved and ecstatic” about the judge’s order but that it came far too late.

“When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?” she said.

The 30-year-old Ozturk had appeared at the Vermont hearing via video from a detention centre in Louisiana, wearing an orange jumpsuit and a hijab.

During her testimony, she recounted being surrounded and detained by plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents near her student housing in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25. Surveillance video of that incident later spread online, sparking outrage.

She said she suffered a series of asthma attacks, 12 in total, as she was being transferred to Louisiana. The first came at the airport in Atlanta, she said, and she did not have all of the medication she needed.

“I was afraid, and I was crying,” she said.

The doctoral student told the judge her studies related to community engagement in children in warzones. She was among dozens of student visa holders and permanent residents targeted by the Trump administration for pro-Palestine advocacy.

The administration has relied on an obscure provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the secretary of state to deport someone deemed to “adversely affect US foreign policy interests”.

Officials have broadly portrayed pro-Palestinian protests and other forms of advocacy as “anti-Semitic”, despite providing scant evidence in individual cases.

Still, Ozturk’s detention has been notable given her relatively low public profile, with her only public advocacy coming in the form of an article she co-wrote with three other students for the campus newspaper. The piece criticised the university’s response to student-led calls for administrators to acknowledge “Palestinian genocide” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies” with links to Israel.

Speaking at Friday’s hearings, Ozturk said Tufts would provide her housing if she is released, and her friends and lawyers would drive her to future court hearings.

She added that she remained committed to finishing her PhD degree.

Crackdown on pro-Palestine advocacy

The judge’s order on Friday came just over a week after Mohsen Mahdawi, a US permanent resident and pro-Palestine protest leader at Columbia University, was released from immigration detention by another federal judge in Vermont.

On Thursday, Mahdawi, who still faces an ongoing deportation case, announced the creation of the Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund, to help immigrants facing deportation hearings.

Speaking to Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey, Mahdawi recounted being detained by immigration officials as he attended a citizenship hearing in Vermont in April.

He said ICE agents had sought to transfer him to the more conservative jurisdiction in Louisiana, as they had done with Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia University protest leader targeted for deportation.

Mahdawi added that the move was meant to isolate him from his community and legal support.

“They had the aeroplane ticket, commercial flight printed with my name on it, but I was lucky enough that we missed the flight by nine minutes,” Mahdawi said.

That brief window, he explained, gave his lawyers time to intervene. They sought and received a temporary restraining order preventing Mahdawi from being transferred out of the state.

Mahdawi credits remaining in Vermont with paving the way to his release.

“I mean, if the plan worked out as they have laid it down, we would not be having this interview,” he said.

Prior to Ozturk’s hearing on Friday, Judge Sessions had ordered her to be transferred to Vermont no later than May 14, as that is where she was held at the time her lawyers filed an initial petition for her release.

Sessions, however, decided to continue with her bail hearing even before Ozturk was physically moved. The Trump administration had previously appealed an earlier deadline for her transfer to Vermont, set for May 1.

Ozturk has not been accused of any crime. The Trump administration has offered little justification for its decision to revoke Ozturk’s student visa, pointing only to the article she co-authored and claiming she was “creating a hostile environment for Jewish students”.

The administration has broadly claimed that visa holders are not afforded the same constitutional rights protections as US citizens, a question that could eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefly weighed in on Friday’s decision during her daily news briefing, where she reiterated the administration’s position that such rulings are tantamount to judicial interference.

“We’ve made quite clear that 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,” she said.

After working in the outdoor industry for three years at Smith, which makes helmets and goggles, Cassie Abel realised there were not many brands built exclusively with women in mind. In 2016, she founded Wild Rye, a rural Idaho-based outdoor apparel brand for women.

Building her business was a labour of passion and included big risks, such as leveraging her house for capital. It was not until 2021 that she became profitable. Now, her business faces yet another existential threat: High tariffs will drive up her costs, and she’s unsure how long she can keep her business alive.

Abel is expecting $700,000 worth of purchase orders arriving in July, which encompasses the brand’s full fall lineup, which she ordered in December from suppliers in China. She says Wild Rye, which imports twice a year, will now be subject to $1.2m in tariffs for its upcoming shipment.

“I don’t have the cash to pay for these tariffs. These tariffs are due upon entering the country. I won’t have time to sell this product before the tariffs are done. We could be out of business in the next four months,” Abel said.

Since taking office, United States President Donald Trump has imposed a 145-percent tariff on China and 10 percent on all other countries. The president has claimed the tariffs incentivise businesses to bring manufacturing back stateside. But that has left hundreds of small businesses like Abel’s scrambling to find ways to manage the hefty fee.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a group of reporters at a White House briefing last week, “The goal here is to bring back the high-quality industrial jobs to the US. President Trump is interested in the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past. You know, we don’t need to necessarily have a booming textile industry like where I grew up again, but we do want to have precision manufacturing and bring that back.”

His comments put additional pressure on employers like Wild Rye. To weather the storm caused by the Trump administration’s tariffs, Abel has frozen hiring, paused salary increases for her 11 full-time employees, and stalled new product development. She said she will need to raise prices on her products for the fall, ranging from 10 to 20 percent.

On April 29, she and hundreds of members of the outdoor apparel community met leaders in Washington to push for assistance. Abel said Democrats were unsure what they could do amid Republican control of the House of Representatives and Senate, while Republican leadership feared retribution if they went against the president.

“I was hearing it [concern] from both sides of the aisle. There’s frustration, it’s like it’s hard to find a path forward. Everyone understands that small businesses are going to crumble, and everyone feels like there’s no playbook for this,” Abel told Al Jazeera.

The US Chamber of Commerce has also pushed the White House to carve out exceptions for small businesses like Wild Rye, which the Trump administration quickly dismissed.

No comparable US alternative

Abel says she started as a made-in-USA brand, but that was not financially sustainable.

“That almost tanked the business before we launched because the US simply doesn’t have the capability or capacity to produce technical apparel,” Abel said.

Most textile products like clothes and shoes that Americans buy are not made in the US. The US imports about 97 percent of clothes, mostly from Asian countries including China, which has been hit hard by the 145-percent tariffs, but also from Vietnam and Bangladesh.

But it’s not just the apparel industry facing this challenge. It’s the entire small business community – defined as a business with 500 employees or less – a portion of the economy that employs roughly 61.7 million Americans, representing 45.9 percent of the US workforce and accounts for 43.5 percent of the US gross domestic product (GDP).

The broader economy has also already felt shockwaves from the tariffs that will impact small businesses. The US GDP fell in the first quarter, per the US Commerce Department, by 0.3 percent after a 2.4 percent increase in the fourth quarter of 2024. According to ADP, job growth stumbled to 62,000—a more immediate metric than the US Labor Department’s jobs report, which lags by a month and shows 177,000 jobs added.

Consumer confidence hit a 13-year low, and consumers are pulling back spending amid fears of further rising costs — which, in turn, means fewer people could buy products ranging from outdoor apparel to single-origin teas and spices.

‘In a tough place’

In 2014, Chitra Agrawal founded Brooklyn Delhi, an Indian cuisine-inspired food brand in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Ben Garthus.

Over the last decade, they have created a range of products, including 14 different condiments and simmer sauces, that started as handmade and have since grown into a large-scale business distributing to major retailers like Whole Foods and Kroger, as well as meal kit services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron.

Because hers is a specialty brand, sourcing certain ingredients from other parts of the world is not just part of the brand’s allure, it is also a necessity.

“We are making these authentic Indian products that require ingredients that are just not grown or available at scale in the US. It kind of puts us in a tough place,” Agrawal told Al Jazeera.

Agrawal said 65 percent to 70 percent of the ingredients she uses come from outside of the US, primarily from India, and a handful from Mexico and Sri Lanka, as well as glass from China.

Like Agrawal, Anjali Bhargava faces a similar challenge. The founder of Anjali’s Cup, a brand that makes single-origin spices and teas from around the world, sources ginger from Vietnam, turmeric from Thailand, and tea from India, ingredients that, in her view, make the brand so special.

In 2024, the United States was the largest importer of both ginger and several different varieties of tea, including black and green, according to Tridge, a global food sourcing data analytics firm.

“I am going to have to pay the tariffs on those things if it comes down to it, if I want to continue making those products. [Not being able to make these products] is not negotiable for me,” Bhargava said.

She says that in order to cut costs, she is trying to find domestic alternatives for aspects of her production, like packaging, a big expense. Pre-tariffs, she imported tins from China. Once her stock runs out, she may have to discontinue four to six of the 11 products she offers because she cannot afford the extra cost for imports.

“Basically, to keep the business moving, I’m being forced to undertake a complete overhaul of my retail packaging [which can be produced stateside], which means redesigning, re-photographing, and that comes with a cost,” Bhargava added.

She says she will need to move away from tins, which she imports from China and explore other kinds of packaging options like pouches. The unexpected one-time costs of $10,000 to $20,000 will eat into her already slim margins, Bhargava says. She is the only full-time employee, but hires freelancers and outsources to other businesses for tasks ranging from packaging to delivery.

Prices go up

Unlike larger companies, it’s much harder for small businesses to absorb the tariffs.

“We’ve seen that it’s hard for small businesses to balance those costs as they have very small margins. They are the ones who are going to get hit hardest,” said Alexis D’Amato, director of government affairs for Small Business Majority, an advocacy group for small businesses.

“They’re bracing for impact on how they’re going to either eat these costs or pass them on to the consumer, which nobody wants to do,” D’Amato added.

Raising prices in response to market pressures does not guarantee they will fall when costs decline. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions forced producers to increase prices. But even after costs eased, grocers kept prices high because consumers continued paying them — and no policy or market force compelled reductions.

That burden weighs on Agrawal.

“Once you make that change and say at one point, I want to roll back those price increases, there’s no guarantee that on the shelf, the prices will decrease. It’s very difficult when you’re working with grocery stores to get your prices to be lowered again. We have to really be very careful about this move. We’re still contemplating it,” said Brooklyn Delhi’s Agrawal.

But these looming concerns have led consumers and businesses to import goods before tariffs kick in, to stock up on key items that may help them avoid raising prices, at least for some time.

In the first quarter, US imports surged by 41.3 percent, including by entrepreneurs like Sean Mackowski, owner of Tallon Electric, a company that makes guitar pedals in Columbus, Ohio.

“We did stock up a lot. I think everybody did their best to scramble, hoping that that will bridge the gap to this going away. But if we get to the end of that bridge, we’ll either need to find a different way or we’re going to start running out of stuff,” Mackowski told Al Jazeera.