Judge orders that Georgetown researcher detained by ICE remain in the U.S.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that a Georgetown University fellow working in the United States legally and detained by immigration authorities cannot be removed from the country, pending the outcome of a lawsuit seeking his release from detention.

Federal judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Virginia’s Eastern District did not rule on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Indian national Badar Khan Suri, who was apprehended earlier this week for what a DHS spokesperson said was “Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” Suri is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in Los Fresnos, Texas, on May 6.

Suri is the latest of a handful of scholars with legal status who have been detained in recent weeks after opposing U.S. foreign policy on Israel, inflaming outrage from critics of the Trump administration.

They argue that targeting people over their opposition to U.S. policy is a violation of the First Amendment that could have chilling effects on free speech.

The administration has been using concerns over terrorism as a reason to escalate deportations, with Venezuelan migrants among the groups targeted for alleged ties to a transnational gang that the Trump administration has designated as a terrorist organization.

“Badar Khan Suri’s detention is a clear violation of his constitutional rights, and he must be released,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in a statement Thursday. “The ‘justification’ given for these violations of Mr. Suri’s right to due process is another violation of the Constitution: a blatant attack on the First Amendment. Mr. Suri and his family are unfortunately the latest victim of President Trump’s assault on the freedom of speech.”

Suri, 41, a postdoctoral fellow specializing in peace and conflict studies at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, was detained outside his home Monday in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, by Department of Homeland Security agents, his attorneys told The Washington Post. He has no criminal record, according to a search of court documents.

Suri, who entered the United States in 2022, was told his visa had been revoked, and he was taken to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, said his lawyers, one of whom filed the lawsuit that prompted Giles’s temporary stay of removal.

A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Earlier this week, department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin alleged on X that Suri — who was admitted to the country on a J-1 visa reserved for scholars and professionals working for a U.S. employer — had a connection to a senior adviser to Hamas, an apparent reference to his wife, a U.S. citizen who once worked with the Gaza foreign ministry and whose father, Ahmed Yousef, is a former political adviser to the now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Court documents filed on Suri’s behalf note that the government has not alleged any crimes. Suri’s attorney, Hassan Ahmad, also said he did not commit any crime but did not address the administration’s claims about Suri’s social media activity.

In a statement, Georgetown spokesperson Meghan Dubyak said Suri was “duly granted a visa” to the United States to continue his research on peace-building in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the university expects the “legal system to adjudicate this case fairly.”

“We support our community members’ rights to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate, even if the underlying ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” Dubyak said.

Several scholars have been arrested in recent days on charges of advocating violence and terrorism.

Last week, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University and green-card holder who has also been taken to Louisiana. President Donald Trump had accused Khalil and other pro-Palestinian activists of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity,” but a federal judge temporarily blocked that deportation.

First Amendment attorneys have said that Khalil’s arrest — over charges that federal officials have tied only to his activism — was unconstitutional and could cause some to limit their criticism of the administration over fears of deportation or other retribution.

Writing an op-ed in the Guardian earlier this week from detention, Khalil called himself a “political prisoner” and said: “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Trump has said on his Truth Social social media platform that Khalil’s arrest was the “first of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the president said in his post.

The Department of Homeland Security followed through on that promise by arresting two more Columbia University pro-Palestinian protesters, who are also being forced to leave the country, the agency said Friday.

The first student — Ranjani Srinivasan, a citizen of India — left the country on her own on Tuesday after her visa was revoked on March 5 for “advocating for violence and terrorism,” the agency said.

A Brown University doctor was also deported to Lebanon on Friday, despite her cousin winning a restraining order to keep her in the country. DHS officials alleged she had attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Ahmad, Suri’s attorney, called his client’s arrest in the wake of those incidents “beyond contemptible.”

“And if an accomplished scholar who focuses on conflict resolution is whom the government decides is bad for foreign policy, then perhaps the problem is with the government, not the scholar,” he said Wednesday.

Suri’s arrest is based on the same section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that federal authorities have used to attempt to deport Khalil.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said on X that Suri’s “activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable” under this obscure, rarely cited provision, which grants the secretary of state the power to move to deport an individual whose presence in the United States could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio made such a determination in Suri’s case on March 15, McLaughlin said.

ICE did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on the detainment, news of which was previously reported on by Politico.

According to his Georgetown biography, Suri is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Foreign Service’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) examining what makes cooperation more difficult among religiously diverse societies — and what can be done to solve those difficulties. He has traveled across conflict zones in India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Middle East. He wrote his 2020 doctoral thesis at a college in India on state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In a statement, the ACMCU alleged the Trump administration was trying to “punish their political opponents,” including those who oppose U.S. support for Israel, and institutions of higher education more broadly.

“First, they came for Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri,” the statement said. “Their ‘crime’ is defending Palestinian human rights. Do you think the Trump Administration will stop there?”

Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a first-year graduate student in the School of Foreign Service’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Saleh was born in Missouri and raised in Gaza, she said in a court filing. In addition to her work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs there, she was a researcher at the Qatar Embassy in New Delhi. She has also served as the executive director of the IndoPal Foundation, according to her Georgetown biography.

Suri was detained after 9 p.m. upon returning from an Iftar dinner, the meal Muslims eat at the end of a day of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, as DHS agents in masks surrounded him, the complaint said.

The father of three called his wife and asked that she be allowed to bring his passport and other documents downstairs. The agents took his passport and a form making him eligible for his J-1 visa and stood with the couple for 10 minutes before driving him to a detention center in Farmville, Virginia, the complaint said.

In a separate filing, Saleh said that Suri had met her father in person twice: once, when he visited Gaza with an international humanitarian convoy in 2011 as a masters student, and again about a year later when he returned to ask for Saleh’s hand in marriage and her father’s blessing.

The couple met in 2011, when Suri visited Gaza with an international humanitarian convoy as a masters student and Saleh served as the convoy’s interpreter, she said in court filings. After marrying, they moved to New Delhi in 2013 and started a family there before Suri applied to come to Georgetown in late 2022.

Ahmad argued in the court filing that the Trump administration was weaponizing immigration law “to punish noncitizens whose views are deemed critical of U.S. policy as it relates to Israel.”

The couple has been the subject of multiple articles in recent weeks that have brought them into public focus. The articles alleged that, in addition to their family ties to Hamas, they have cheered on or defended the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The Israeli Embassy in the U.S. further spread the allegations, calling Saleh a threat to Israeli and Jewish students — which their attorneys deny.

According to the complaint, Saleh is featured on the Canary Mission, a website that says it features people who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.”

When reached by phone, Saleh referred a Washington Post reporter to his lawyer.

But, in a court filing, she recounted the impact of seeing her husband taken away in a black SUV.

“I watched him being driven away with no idea why he has been arrested,” Saleh said in a court filing. “I feel completely unsafe and can’t stop looking at the door, terrified that someone else will come and take me and the children away as well.”

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• Alice Crites, Aaron Schaffer, Miriam Berger and Marianne LeVine contributed.