A Georgetown University graduate student from India who was taken into custody this week and targeted for deportation by the Trump administration never made any pro-Hamas or antisemitic comments, his lawyer said.
Immigration agents detained Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow who teaches at Georgetown and has a visa, outside his home in Arlington, Virginia, on Monday night, his attorney has said. The Department of Homeland Security claimed Suri is “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.”
Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, denied Thursday that Suri ever made pro-Hamas or antisemitic statements.
Ahmad has objected to Suri’s detention as “beyond contemptible.”
“This is still the United States of America, and we don’t punish people, we don’t whisk them away and send them 1,000 miles away from their family, based on what they may have said, what they may have posted on social media or who they are related to,” Ahmad said.
A federal judge in Virginia ordered Thursday that Suri not be removed from the United States unless ordered by the court.
Sophia Gregg, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said the judge’s block on any deportation was “exactly what we were hoping for.”
“We were very concerned for our client, especially when we learned that he was at a Louisiana staging facility, which is the last stop on the way to tarmac,” she said Thursday. “That was a big concern for us, that he would be summarily deported.”
Suri was at the Alexandria Staging Facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, on Thursday, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Wednesday on X, “Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”
Suri has a wife who is a U.S. citizen and three children in Virginia. His wife’s father, Ahmed Yousef, who lives in Gaza, is a former adviser to now-deceased Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — but The New York Times reported he left the Hamas-led government of Gaza more than a decade ago and does not have a senior position with Hamas.
Yousef told the newspaper that Suri was not involved in any “political activism,” including on behalf of Hamas, the Times reported. Yousef has also publicly criticized Hamas’ decision to attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the newspaper reported.
Ahmad told NBC News that he has no information that Suri has been in regular contact with Yousef.
“I’m only aware of one instance when my client had contact with his father-in-law, and that was to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage,” Ahmad said.
The Trump administration is trying to deport two other people involved in protests against the war in Gaza at Columbia University.
One of them, Mahmoud Khalil, is a Columbia graduate student who is a legal permanent resident and is married to a U.S. citizen. The second is Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who attended Columbia but overstayed her visa, officials said.
The Trump administration is seeking to deport Suri and Khalil under part of U.S. immigration law that allows it if a person “would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The ACLU and others have called the administration’s actions an attempt to punish people for expressing their constitutionally protected views about Israel and the war in Gaza.
“Political speech — however controversial some may find it — may never be the basis for punishment, including deportation,” Mary Bauer, the executive director of ACLU of Virginia, said in a statement Thursday. “We will not let this egregious, unprecedented, and illegal abuse of power go unchecked.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended attempts to deport Khalil by saying that “no one has a right to a student visa.” A judge has temporarily blocked Khalil’s deportation.
President Donald Trump in his election campaign condemned student protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza, which followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. Some congressional Republicans have also criticized universities for what they called antisemitic behavior at protests.
The Justice Department in February announced what it called an antisemitism task force focused on college campuses. The Trump administration on March 7 also said it was canceling around $400 million in federal grants to Columbia.
On March 4, Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social, “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.”
Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
The director of that center, Nader Hashemi, told NBC Washington that he is shocked by Suri’s arrest and the attempt to deport him. Hashemi said that that Suri was not political or an activist, and that he was focused on his teaching and research.
“I would never imagine in a million years to see a faculty member, a student who’s engaged in exercising their First Amendment rights would be picked up by the state and thrown into jail and then deported,” Hashemi told the station.
“That’s what they do in Putin’s Russia. That’s what they do in Xi Jinping’s China,” he said. “That’s what they do in the Islamic Republic of Iran, not in the United States, at least until now.”
