Judge Orders Georgetown Academic Released From Immigration Detention
A judge in Virginia on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University who was arrested in March, after two months of detention in an immigration facility in Texas.
The order, issued from the bench by Judge Patricia Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia, came as courts around the country have been forced to navigate a sea of legal challenges caused by the Trump administration’s campaign to remove scores of foreign academics from the United States.
Judge Giles ordered that Mr. Suri be released without bond and imposed minimal conditions beyond requiring him to continue attending court proceedings.
Mr. Suri was among several individuals legally studying in the United States, including Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Momodou Taal, whom the Trump administration targeted for their pro-Palestinian activism, raising profound legal questions about freedom of expression.
Ms. Ozturk was released from detention last week as her case proceeds.
On March 15, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a determination that Mr. Suri’s presence in the United States “would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences,” according to a sworn statement that a Virginia immigration office filed in Mr. Suri’s case.
Two days later, Mr. Suri, an Indian national, was apprehended by masked immigration officials outside his home in Rosslyn, Va., and shuttled through detention centers in Virginia, Louisiana and Texas. He was granted a hearing before an immigration judge in Texas in May, and has spent the ensuing months at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado.
In April, the American Civil Liberties Union released a video of his arrest, which closely resembled the spontaneous detentions of Ms. Ozturk and Mr. Mahdawi by masked immigration agents.
In a statement in April, Mr. Suri said he had “never even been to a protest” and the petition for his release filed by his lawyers suggested that he was more likely targeted because of his marriage to a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent who has been scrutinized by conservative outlets over her family’s ties to Hamas.
Mapheze Saleh, Mr. Suri’s wife, is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader whom Israel assassinated last year in Iran.
The petition by his lawyers stated that both Mr. Suri and his wife had been subject to online harassment over their speech in support of Palestinians. Ms. Saleh’s photo and a dossier about her work at Al Jazeera and her past social media posts appeared on a list published by the Canary Mission, a shadowy group that says its mission is to single out those who promote antisemitism. Civil rights advocates have accused the group of doxxing critics of Israel.
Several other academics who were targeted by immigration enforcement this year have also had their profiles appear on the Canary Mission, which the complaint described as an “anonymously run blacklisting site.”
Mr. Suri’s lawyers argued that he had been singled out “based on his family connections and constitutionally protected speech.”
Mr. Suri, who has not been charged with a crime, moved to the United States in 2022 and had been teaching a course on minority rights in South Asia through his role at Georgetown this semester, according to court filings.
After his arrest in March, another district court judge ruled that Mr. Suri could not be removed from the United States before a court had the opportunity to weigh in.
The decision came as other courts have taken a skeptical view of the Trump administration’s legal basis for keeping foreign academics in detention over their ties to pro-Palestinian movements.
A federal judge recently ordered Mr. Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who had organized pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus, released on bail. Mr. Mahdawi, a green card holder who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, was on his way to an appointment toward obtaining U.S. citizenship in Vermont when he was taken into custody by immigration authorities.
A lawsuit before a judge in Massachusetts has sought to bar the State Department and immigration enforcement agencies from targeting foreign students because of their speech or activism more generally.
Last week, the judge in that case denied a request by the government to dismiss the suit, finding that it raised “novel First Amendment issues” that merited consideration.