Detained Georgetown scholar must have his case heard in Virginia, judge rules

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A Georgetown University researcher who says he has been illegally targeted for deportation amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus activism must have his case heard in Virginia as he fights to stay in the United States, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, May 6.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles is likely to order immigration officials to return Badar Khan Suri from Texas as she continues to consider the legal merits of his case. The researcher was arrested March 17 as he arrived at his Arlington County home and was sent to an immigration facility southwest of Dallas, where he has been held for more than a month.

The ruling is a victory for Suri, a father of three who arrived from India in late 2022 for a fellowship at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, though it could also end up being temporary. He made an initial appearance Tuesday morning before an immigration judge in Texas, where his legal team denied the charge that he posed a threat.

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Suri, who had been granted a visa for visiting scholars and professionals, argued that the Trump administration sent him to Texas as payback after he filed his lawsuit in Virginia. A 2004 Supreme Court ruling says lawsuits alleging wrongful detention generally must be heard within the detainee’s “district of confinement.”

But Giles voiced concerns at a court hearing last week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials may have quickly shuffled Suri around facilities in Virginia before sending him to Louisiana and then Texas in the hours after his arrest to prevent his lawyers from filing a lawsuit in the proper district. The judge indicated Suri’s case was “extraordinary” and could be heard in Virginia under an exception to the 2004 Supreme Court ruling.

“The last time [Suri] was permitted to speak to his wife, the only information he had was that he would be detained in this District,” Giles said in a written ruling Tuesday, adding that one of his attorneys “worked diligently in less than twenty hours and filed the petition in this District based on the only information that was available to him – that his client was detained in this District.”

She added: “The facts before the Court today demand an exception to the district of confinement rule.”

A Justice Department attorney, David Byerley, said at Thursday’s hearing that the court would have to “create a fiction” that Suri’s location was unknown at the time his lawsuit was filed to assume jurisdiction in Virginia. He added that ICE has “no plan to remove him … before removal proceedings run their course.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio authorized Suri’s deportation March 15, and the Department of Homeland Security accused the researcher on X of spreading “Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” while having ties to a Hamas adviser – 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.

“Badar has said many times that he does not support Hamas,” his wife, Mapheze Saleh, said in an email. “I do not support the use of violence against civilians perpetrated by any group or government. Neither does Badar. He is deeply committed to peace and to the human dignity of each and every person in this world.”

She added that her family had been subjected to racist attacks online: “My love and support for the Palestinian people and my outrage about the atrocities and genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza are being weaponized against me and reduced to a blanket tagline of ‘support for Hamas.’”

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.” Days later, he posted another Facebook message questioning whether the terrorist attacks happened, according to screenshots posted online.

Suri’s attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia say the Trump administration is using a rarely invoked provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act to punish people on college campuses who express support for Palestine amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

That provision gives the U.S. secretary of state the power to revoke visas and deport individuals “whose presence or activities … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” The Trump administration has been citing it in several cases to try to deport campus activists whom they accuse of echoing Hamas propaganda, including Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk.

Last week, a federal judge in Vermont released a Palestinian student, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was detained and slated for deportation after leading protests at Columbia against Israel. U.S. officials had invoked the same law cited in Suri’s case to detain Mahdawi. U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford found that Mahdawi had presented a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration was trying to stifle his speech.

“Even if he were a firebrand, his conduct is protected by the First Amendment,” Crawford said in a written ruling last week.

Academic leaders and civil rights attorneys have called the wave of deportation cases on the nation’s college campuses a novel and chilling assault on free speech – and have also raised concerns that Trump officials are moving at unprecedented speed to transport migrants to facilities in the South before they can file lawsuits in their home states challenging their detention.

“He’s representative of the Kafkaesque version of justice in America right now,” Rep. Don Beyer (D) said in a courthouse interview after attending Suri’s hearing Thursday. “Taken with no charges filed, he appears to have been targeted because his American wife has a father who was a Hamas official. It’s a clear assault on the freedom of association.”

Suri, 41, and other detainees have been plucked off the streets or college campuses and swiftly transported to Louisiana or Texas, his attorneys argued, because the decisions of federal judges in those states get reviewed by the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, and Trump officials see it as friendly ground.

Virginia, on the other hand, is under the jurisdiction of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently issued a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport migrants without court hearings or due process. Giles was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2021.

“Dr. Khan Suri’s targeting, apprehension, transfer, and ongoing detention violate the First Amendment … and chill other individuals who express support for Palestinian rights,” his ACLU attorneys wrote in a court filing.

They argued that immigration officials were required under their own rules to detain Suri near his family in Virginia, which has two facilities for migrants facing deportation. The Caroline Detention Facility and Farmville Detention Center were at approximately 66 percent and 84 percent of their capacities, respectively, when Suri was arrested, according to his lawsuit.

Justice Department attorneys described Suri in legal documents as a “nonimmigrant visitor” and argued that judges lack the power to release such people or stop their deportations once Rubio has ordered them out of the country. But they agreed to transfer Suri’s case to a federal court in Texas, or perhaps Louisiana, where he was temporarily being held when his lawsuit was filed in Virginia.

The researcher’s attorneys said he had been shuttled to Texas as payback for filing his wrongful-detention lawsuit in Virginia. Justice Department attorneys said he was already outside Giles’s jurisdiction, in a holding facility in Louisiana, when his lawyers filed the petition for habeas corpus March 18. Suri had been given a written notice the day before, showing he would be taken to Texas, the lawyers said.

In court filings, Justice Department attorneys denied that ICE was trying to funnel cases to Louisiana and Texas to get more favorable treatment from judges; an immigration official submitted a declaration saying that Suri was sent to Texas to prevent potential overcrowding in the two Virginia facilities.

“The fact is that Texas has more ICE facilities than all the states from Virginia to Maine combined,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote.

Giles did not find that persuasive. She said at Thursday’s hearing that Suri had been assigned to a cell while he was briefly held at the Farmville detention center in Virginia upon his arrest. But when he got to Texas days later, space was so limited at the facility he was assigned that officials placed him in a TV room with a cot.

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