Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University, who was arrested for deportation last month has been released following a federal judge’s order.
In her ruling Judge Patricia Giles said that Khan Suri’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention was in violation of the First Amendment, the right to free speech; and the Fifth amendment, the right to due process.
Suri was detained on March 17, 2025, when he was returning home from a traditional Ramadan meal celebration.
According to a statement masked federal agents took Suri’s passport and told him he was being deported “today,” despite his lawful status in the United States.
“The Trump administration is trying to silence speech it doesn’t agree with by targeting people like Dr. Khan Suri and Mahmoud Khalil, but ideas are not illegal,” said ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Mary Bauer, said, according to the statement.
“Americans don’t want to live in a country where the federal government ‘disappears’ people whose views it doesn’t like. The First Amendment protects all of us – regardless of citizenship – from being punished by the government for our political speech.”
An Indian national, Suri lives with his wife and three children – all under the age of 10 – in Rosslyn, Virginia. The couple moved to the U.S., where Dr. Khan Suri’s wife was born, to raise their children in a society that values religious tolerance.
“I’ve never even been to a protest. I came to the U.S. to work and raise my family: I go to work, come home late, and still they came and took me and broke my family,” says Dr. Khan Suri. “In my work, I’ve seen lots of injustice. I just didn’t think it would happen to me here.”
NBC channel reported that Khan Suri was accused by the Department of Homeland Security of “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin addressed Khan Suri’s detention on X, saying that “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”
His wife Maphaz Ahmad Yousef, is an American citizen from Gaza. She is also a student at Georgetown. Her father, Ahmed Yousef, is a former adviser to now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the NBC reported.
She told The New York Times that her father left his position more than a decade ago. He has also been outspoken in his criticism of Hamas.
Court documents say, Khan Suri met his father-in-law in person for the first and only time in 2013 to ask for his blessing to marry Maphaz Ahmad Yousef.
Khan Suri has spoken to Ahmed Yousef from time to time about “family matters and his academic pursuits,” the documents said.
However, since the entire family moved to the U.S. in 2023, Khan Suri has not spoken directly to his father-in-law.
