Georgetown faculty call for solidarity after postdoc Badar Khan Suri’s detention

(RNS) — The faculty at Georgetown University’s center for Muslim-Christian understanding is protesting the detention of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow who has been detained by federal immigration authorities, calling his arrest and relocation to Louisiana an “authoritarian weaponization of the legal system to attack political speech that is protected by the First Amendment.”

“Dr. Khan Suri has committed no crime,” said a statement from the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, founded in 1993 by Georgetown professor John L. Esposito. “Like Mahmoud Khalil, he was arrested in the context of a campaign by the Trump Administration to destroy higher education in the United States and punish their political opponents,” the statement said, referring to the Columbia University graduate student who was detained in New York earlier this month.

According to Politico, which first reported Khan Suri’s detention, Khan Suri’s lawyer has filed a lawsuit asking for his immediate release and argued that Khan Suri is being punished for the Palestinian heritage of his U.S. citizen wife, Mapheze Saleh. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered that Khan Suri could not be deported from the U.S. unless and until the court issued an order allowing it.

Saleh and her studies at Georgetown’s Master of Arts in Arab Studies program have been targets of an online campaign by conservative and pro-Israel groups for several weeks, including the Middle East Forum, a think tank founded by anti-Islam activist Daniel Pipes, and an early February post by the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Badar Khan Suri. (Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

Saleh’s father, Ahmed Yousef, was a political adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the early 2000s but told The New York Times in response to Khan Suri’s detention that he left his position with Gaza’s Hamas-run government more than a decade ago. In an interview with the Times earlier this month, Yousef called Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel “a terrible error.”

Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on social media platform X that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had designated Khan Suri as deportable on Saturday (March 15).

“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media. Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” McLaughlin wrote.

The government has justified Khan Suri’s detention using a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that had not been used since 1997 until it was used against Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident. Khan Suri, an Indian national, was studying on a J-1 student visa.

The provision says that a non-U.S. citizen is deportable if the U.S. secretary of state “has reasonable ground to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Colleagues said that Khan Suri, a Muslim, had not been particularly outspoken on Palestinian issues. He had been solo teaching a course on “Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia,” an indication, Esposito told RNS, that he was a particularly trusted postdoctoral fellow.

Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center, said its staff members were feeling “shock, horror, bewilderment” at Khan Suri’s detention.

“ No one saw this coming,” said Hashemi. “One of the first things I did after I came to work the next day was go through the list of people that I know and who might be vulnerable and could be next in line” because they aren’t U.S. citizens and could be targeted for their views on Palestinian issues.

As he hears from “petrified” colleagues and students, Hashemi said, “ these behaviors that we’re seeing from the U.S. government are policies that we see in other countries in the world, like in Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, not in the United States.”

Khan Suri’s colleagues told RNS that Khan Suri and Khalil’s detentions are examples of continued Islamophobia from President Donald Trump, who began his first administration by instituting a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries.

In its statement, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding argued that Khan Suri’s detention should be understood in the context of the Trump administration’s “support for genocide abroad and McCarthyism at home.” 

“At the precise moment that Dr. Khan Suri was arrested, Israel, after coordinating with the Trump Administration, launched a brutal attack on the people of Gaza that according to Amnesty International killed at least 400 people including 174 children,” the center wrote.

The Washington Post has confirmed that Israel’s airstrikes killed more than 400 people on Tuesday, part of a resumption of military attacks after a two-month ceasefire. 

The Gaza Health Ministry had reported before Tuesday’s strikes that more than 48,000 people in Gaza had been killed and more than 112,000 injured in the Israeli military campaign that began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and resulted in about 250 people being taken hostage.

The arrest is also being taken as a further move by the Trump administration against institutions of higher learning. The administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism has canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts for Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” according to a March 7 Department of Education statement. The White House also said they suspended $175 million in funding for the University of Pennsylvania, claiming, erroneously, that they have violated an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports.

The statement from the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center recalled that Vice President JD Vance had given a keynote address calling universities “the enemy” in 2021. “A bedrock of American democracy has been our universities and colleges,” the center wrote in its statement. “Critical thinking poses a threat to all authoritarian regimes, including the one in Washington D.C.”

Eli McCarthy, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown in justice and peace studies and theology and religious studies, told RNS that Khan Suri’s detention is “incredibly unjust.”

“Our political leaders need to model a more constructive way to deal with conflicting foreign policy perspectives,” said McCarthy, who has also been an organizer of Christian protests for peace in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

McCarthy called the moment “a critical opportunity” for Georgetown’s leadership and other Jesuit universities “to manifest solidarity and to take a visible, collective stand against this pattern of domination, injustice and dehumanizing approaches to conflict by our political leaders.”

Hashemi told RNS that Georgetown “has been very positive and very supportive of this case. This is a Jesuit university that takes people’s religious identity very seriously and tries to support that aspect of who people are.”

Joel Hellman, dean of Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, which is home to the center, wrote in an email to faculty and staff that he was not aware of any illegal activity that Khan Suri had engaged in during his time on campus “nor has he posed a threat to the security of our campus.”

“Like many in our community, Badar has been exercising his constitutionally protected rights to express his views on the war in the Middle East,” wrote Hellman. “Georgetown has consistently protected such freedoms within the context of our longstanding Speech and Expression Policy.”

Hellman expressed his concern about the detention, writing, “As an individual, I am deeply concerned for the welfare of our colleague and his family.” He added, “As Dean, I am deeply troubled by the chilling effect such events could have on freedom of expression on this campus, which is, of course, at the very core of our mission.”