Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri released after ICE detention in Texas

By Gloria Pazmino and Emily R. Condon, CNN

(CNN) — Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri was released from a federal detention center in Texas on Wednesday, marking at least the third time a detained student or academic targeted by the Trump administration because of their protest activity or affiliation was released from immigration detention.

Earlier on Wednesday, US District Court Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, issuing her ruling from the bench, said the government had failed to provide any evidence to continue to detain Khan Suri, who has been held in a Texas immigration detention facility for two months.

“I gave the government multiple opportunities to submit any type of filing to controvert these claims or support their opposition to these motions and they declined,” Tolliver Giles said.

The judge ordered Khan Suri’s release without bond, only requiring him to continue living in Virginia and to attend court proceedings in person. Khan Suri will be able to attend his deportation proceedings virtually, which are unfolding in Texas, Tolliver Giles said.

Khan Suri is one of several non-citizen international scholars, faculty and students who have been detained or targeted for immigration enforcement as part of the Trump administration’s effort to target noncitizens who have participated in pro-Palestinian activism. Others include Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Madawi and Momodou Taal.

Last month, a Vermont judge ordered Columbia University student and permanent US resident Mohsen Mahdawi to be released. Mahdawi helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and was detained during a citizenship appointment.

In Vermont last week, a judge ordered the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national and Tufts University student who was detained a year after she co-authored an op-ed in the school newspaper which was critical of the school’s response to the war in Gaza.

The cases have raised thorny legal questions about jurisdiction as well as First Amendment rights to free speech, which extend to both citizens and noncitizens under the US Constitution.

“He should have never been arrested and jailed for his constitutionally protected speech, just because our government disagrees with him,” said Sophia Gregg, an attorney for the ACLU, who argued on Khan Suri’s behalf Wednesday.

Khan Suri’s attorneys said his detention was “punitive in purpose” and a retaliatory measure for his advocacy for Gaza and association with his wife and her father, a government official in Gaza, during the hearing.

His wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a Palestinian American. Saleh is also a former employee of the Qatari-based news network Al Jazeera and the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in Iran last year.

Khan Suri, who has not been charged with a crime, has been in the United States since 2022 on a valid visa. According to court documents, Khan Suri is a post-doctoral fellow and taught a course focused on South Asian minority rights at Georgetown.

The Trump administration revoked Khan Suri’s visa and accused him of having ties to Hamas, a terrorist organization. He was detained by masked federal officers outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia, in March. He was moved across multiple state lines shortly after his arrest before being held in custody in a Texas detention center.

Saleh, who was in court during Wednesday’s proceedings, said her husband has told her he wears his detention “as a badge of honor” because he believes he was targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian background.

“Badar is a scholar, a researcher and a lover of freedom, truth and justice. I’m proud to be his wife and the mother of his three children,” Saleh said. “I’m a Palestinian woman who feels the pain of my people in Gaza. I’m also an American who believes in the freedom of speech. We are here in US, to live, to learn, to research and practice our profession, not to be separated as a family, not to be tortured, not to be disappeared, and definitely not to be to put in the detention center for no crime.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.