Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a researcher at Georgetown and legal U.S. resident, was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents outside his home on Monday, March 17.
Khan Suri is an Indian citizen and postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He is lawfully residing in the U.S. through a student visa, according to a petition for his release filed in federal court.
The Voice has obtained the petition for habeas corpus filed by Khan Suri’s attorney in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. The petition claims that by arresting Khan Suri and attempting to deport him, the federal government has violated a number of his constitutional rights, including his First Amendment right to freedom of speech and his Fifth Amendment right to due process.
Based on these grounds, the petition calls for Khan Suri’s immediate release. Khan Suri’s lawyer did not immediately respond to the Voice’s requests for comment.
According to the lawsuit, Khan Suri was arrested and charged with “removability” under a section of U.S. immigration law that outlines who can be deported from the United States. The government is using the same law in Khan Suri’s case that it used to detain and begin deportation proceedings against Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month.
The lawsuit argues that this decision was made in pursuit of a policy, developed by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seeking to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Mr. Suri solely for their family times to those who may have expressed criticism of U.S. foreign policy as it relates to Israel, or who are perceived to hold such critical views imputed to them due to their familial relationship.”
The lawsuit argues that the policy is unlawfully “targeting noncitizens for removal based on protected speech [and] is arbitrary and capricious.” It also states that Rubio’s determination that Kahn Suri’s presence could “have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” is “an abuse of discretion contrary to constitutional right, contrary to law, and in excess of statutory jurisdiction.”
Khan Suri is the husband of Mapheze Ahmad Saleh (GRAD ’26), a U.S. citizen. Saleh’s father, Ahmed Yousef, was a “senior political advisor” to Hamas leadership, according to the Hindustan Times, which interviewed Saleh in 2018. Yousef left the group and publicly condemned its attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, calling them a “terrible error.”
Saleh is currently a masters student at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown. Following an article last month by CAMERA on Campus, a nonprofit dedicated to “defending Israel against hostility and distortions on campus,” Saleh’s biography went viral on X. In the storm that followed, a number of right-wing accounts and publications called for her expulsion and deportation.
The lawsuit notes that Khan Suri and his wife “have long been doxxed and smeared” by organizations like CAMERA and Canary Mission, which “maintains a blacklist of individuals perceived to support Palestinian rights and is infamous for bullying, slandering, and defaming academics and students.”
Furthermore, the lawsuit states that the government has not given any indication that Khan Suri, who has no criminal record, was charged with a crime before his detention.
“Neither Secretary Rubio nor any other government official has alleged that Mr. Suri has committed any crime, or indeed, broken any law whatsoever,” reads the lawsuit.
A university spokesperson told the Voice yesterday that they are also not aware of Khan Suri engaging in any illegal activity.
The lawsuit also describes the events that took place when Khan Suri was detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at his home. Khan Suri was returning from iftar—the meal Muslims eat to break their fast during Ramadan—when DHS agents surrounded him outside his home.
Agents allowed Saleh to bring them Khan Suri’s passport and other documents, but did not allow her to give them to Khan Suri himself.
“The agents had face coverings, and Ms. Saleh could only see their eyes,” the lawsuit also reads.
The lawsuit also states that Khan Suri is “at imminent risk of being moved to a detention facility in Los Fresnos, Texas, on the Mexican border,” 1,600 miles away from his family’s home in Virginia, where he lives with Saleh and their three children.
The lawsuit argues that the government’s actions are “isolating him from his wife, children, community, and legal team,” and “are plainly intended as retaliation and punishment for Mr. Suri’s protected speech and intended to silence, or at the very least restrict and chill, his speech now and in the future.”
