Georgetown researcher released from ICE custody after judge’s order

Georgetown researcher released from ICE custody after judge’s order

Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown University researcher who has been held in an immigration detention center in Texas since March, was released from custody Wednesday, hours after a federal judge ruled that Trump administration officials probably violated his rights in their ongoing attempt to deport him.

Suri, a postdoctoral fellow who lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and three children, says he is being wrongfully targeted by immigration authorities because of his family’s support for the Palestinian people in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. U.S. officials have invoked a rarely used statute as they seek to deport Suri to his native India, calling him a threat to foreign-policy interests.

At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered Suri released from immigration custody. He was released hours later, his attorneys said. The ruling came days after Giles asserted jurisdiction over the case in Virginia, denying a request from the Justice Department to transfer proceedings to a federal court in Texas.

As a condition of Suri’s release, Giles ordered that Suri reside in Virginia and attend hearings in her courtroom.

A photograph released Wednesday afternoon by his legal team showed a beaming Suri exiting the detention facility. He then took a flight to Virginia, his legal team said.

Badar Khan Suri, left, leaves the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, on Wednesday after the ruling.

Suri landed at Dulles International Airport just after 9 p.m. Wednesday night. About 40 minutes later — an agonizing wait for the dozens of supporters who came to welcome him home — he emerged outside security to cheers. His wife, Mapheze Saleh, rushed to hug him, and his supporters, wearing kaffiyehs and waiving Palestinian flags, clapped for several minutes, chanting “1, 2, 3, Badar is free!”

Suri, in turn, put his hand over his heart, then raised it in a peace sign. “I’m free but things are not complete — other students should be free,” he said to the crowd, as some smiled and others wiped away tears in the middle of the arrivals terminal. “What’s happening is not American.” He then thanked his lawyers, friends and family and said detention was worth it if it brought more attention to the war in Gaza.

His wife hugged him again. One of his attorneys gave him a banana and a pear, worried he might be hungry.

After 30 minutes of clapping, hugging and chanting, Suri and Saleh walked out to the Dulles parking lot and drove home, where friends planned to gather late into the night.

“I want to show him how loved he is,” Saleh said.

Friends, family and supporters of Suri cheer as he returns home to Virginia.

The judge declined a government attorney’s request to stay her ruling for seven days while the Justice Department weighs a possible appeal. Giles said her ruling does not affect Suri’s separate case in immigration court.

Suri, whose academic research focuses on minority rights in India, was arrested outside his Arlington County home on the evening of March 17 and was sent days later to an immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas, southwest of Dallas. According to court records, Suri, 41, entered the United States on a visa for visiting scholars in 2022. His attorneys say he has been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus activism over a few social media posts and the support his wife, a U.S. citizen, has shown for Palestinians.

“He is now over 1,000 miles away from home … packed in an overcrowded detention center,” one of Suri’s attorneys, Sophia Gregg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, argued at the hearing Wednesday.

Ruling from the bench, Giles found that Suri was likely to succeed on the merits of his lawsuit, which alleges that U.S. officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of association as well as his due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment. Releasing Suri also was in the public interest, Giles said, because of the need to “disrupt the chilling effect on protected speech.”

Statements expressing support for the Palestinian people, or criticizing U.S. support for Israel in the war in Gaza, “do not appear to qualify as incitement, defamation, obscenity or true threats of violence,” Giles said, and are “likely protected political speech.”

“The First Amendment extends to noncitizens, as it makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens,” the judge said, adding later that Suri “has not been accused of any crime or convicted of any crime.”

Samar Saeed, left, stands with Mapheze Saleh, the wife of Badar Khan Suri, after a judge ordered Suri’s release on Wednesday in Alexandria, Virginia.

Saleh said her husband considered it a “badge of honor” to be detained over his statements in support of the Palestinian people. Colleagues from Georgetown submitted letters to the judge attesting to his interest in peaceful conflict resolution. “If they searched for 100 years, they would not find anything against him,” Saleh said.

After the judge’s ruling, Saleh said, “I have no words; it feels amazing.”

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided to revoke Suri’s visa under a federal law that gives U.S. officials the power to deport people whose presence or activities in the country could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” — the same law the Trump administration has cited in seeking to deport Columbia University students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, among others. Suri’s attorneys say he is at the forefront of a chilling attack on free speech on college campuses.

In recent rulings, federal judges in Vermont ordered Mahdawi and Ozturk released on bond as they challenge their deportations. Those judges found that the Trump administration may be targeting Mahdawi and Ozturk for exercising their right to free speech.

Groups that track pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses have pointed out in online posts that two days after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, Suri posted a Facebook message saying, “Palestine … has all right to fight back against the settler colonialism of Israel, including the legal right to resort to armed resistance against occupation.” Suri’s father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef, is a former political adviser to the now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Samar Saeed, left, embraces Mapheze Saleh, left center, the wife of Badar Khan Suri as people react outside the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse after a judge ordered Suri’s release Wednesday in Alexandria.

Justice Department officials have described Suri in court papers as a “nonimmigrant” visitor and argued that his free-speech rights are outweighed by the need to protect U.S. foreign-policy interests. The Department of Homeland Security has accused Suri of spreading “Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”

Attorneys for the Justice Department argued that federal district court judges lack the power to release detainees or stop their deportations once Rubio has ordered them out of the country, though they conceded Suri was not a flight risk or a danger to the community.

Hundreds of Georgetown alumni and students have signed letters calling for Suri’s release. In the Washington area, more than 100 Jewish clergy members signed an open letter rejecting the Trump administration’s premise that the detention of Suri and others was in the name of combating campus antisemitism.