A federal judge ordered Friday that the case to free Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student from Turkey, from immigration detention should be moved to a court in Vermont, denying a government demand to hold the proceedings in Louisiana, where she is being held.

Ms. Ozturk, a legal resident on a student visa, was swept up by the government as part of what the Trump administration has described as a campaign against antisemitic activists on campus.

In a hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the government had stealthily transferred her from Massachusetts, where she was arrested, to Louisiana without informing her lawyers where she was. The lawyer, Adriana Lafaille, suggested the government was seeking a court that would favor its case.

Louisiana has one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.

Government lawyers told the court that Ms. Ozturk had been moved to Louisiana because there was not an available bed for a female detainee in New England, and that there was no intent to withhold information about her location.

In her ruling on Friday, Judge Denise Casper of U.S. District Court in Boston, said that Vermont was the proper venue because Ms. Ozturk was being held there overnight at the time that her lawyers — not knowing where she was — filed a petition for her release in Boston.

Normally, a petition to free someone would be filed in the jurisdiction where the person was confined.

Judge Casper wrote that she was transferring the case to Vermont “in the interest of justice.”

“The irregularity of the arrest, detention and processing here is coupled with the failure to disclose Ozturk’s whereabouts even after the government was aware that she had counsel and the petition was filed in this court,” the judge wrote.

On March 25, federal agents in plain clothes, some in masks, surrounded Ms. Ozturk on the street in front of her apartment in Somerville, Mass., took her phone and handcuffed her. Her lawyers were unable to find her for almost 24 hours as the agents drove her through New Hampshire to Vermont before putting her on an early morning plane to Louisiana, where she is now being held in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile.

In a statement after Ms. Ozturk’s arrest, the Department of Homeland Security said it sought to deport her because she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”

The only evidence that has surfaced against her is an opinion essay critical of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza that she and other students wrote and published in the student newspaper. But the university has said that the essay met its standards, and that it had not received any information that would warrant her arrest.

The judge’s decision is one of two defeats for the government this week in such cases. On Tuesday, a New Jersey federal judge ruled that the case to free Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate whom the government is also seeking to deport, would remain in New Jersey, instead of being transferred to Louisiana. He also is being held in a center there as the court fight proceeds.