A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the immediate release of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University who was arrested in March, after two months of detention in an immigration facility in Texas.
Ruling from the bench, Judge Patricia Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia said the government had declined every opportunity to provide evidence detailing why Mr. Suri, an Indian national, should be detained. She also said it had not identified any past statements he had made that represented a threat to U.S. interests, as the government had claimed.
Judge Giles ordered that Mr. Suri be released without bond and imposed minimal conditions beyond requiring him to return to Virginia and attend all court proceedings. The government also had not offered proof that Mr. Suri, a scholar committed to “peace and conflict resolution,” might pose a flight risk, she said. The judge also decided against subjecting him to GPS monitoring or other terms the government had requested.
Mr. Suri was among several people legally studying in the United States — including Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Momodou Taal — whom the Trump administration targeted for their pro-Palestinian activism, raising profound legal questions about freedom of expression. Ms. Ozturk was released from detention last week as her case proceeds.
Mr. Suri, who has not been charged with a crime, moved to the United States in 2022 and had been teaching a course on minority rights in South Asia through his role at Georgetown this semester, according to court filings.
After Mr. Suri’s arrest in March, another district court judge ruled that he could not be removed from the United States before a court had the opportunity to weigh in.
Judge Giles said Mr. Suri’s release was necessary to “disrupt the chilling effect” his detention most likely had on others who have been critical of Israel. She also said it was clear to her that he had been arrested “for punitive reasons,” in violation of the First Amendment, which protects speech and the freedom to associate without being retaliated against over the beliefs of one’s family members.
Mr. Suri’s lawyers had argued that he had been targeted because of his wife’s background.
“The First Amendment extends to noncitizens and doesn’t distinguish between citizens and noncitizens,” Judge Giles said.
After a request by Mr. Suri’s lawyers on Wednesday, the judge also ordered the government not to try to “re-detain” him without providing at least two days’ notice.
On March 15, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a determination that Mr. Suri’s presence in the United States “would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences,” according to a sworn statement that a Virginia immigration office filed in Mr. Suri’s case. Judge Giles noted on Wednesday that the government had never submitted that memo for her to review, leaving her in the dark about any details it might contain.
Two days later, Mr. Suri was apprehended by masked immigration officials outside his home in Rosslyn, Va., and shuttled through detention centers in Virginia, Louisiana and Texas. He was granted a hearing before an immigration judge in Texas in May, and has spent the ensuing months at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado.
In April, the American Civil Liberties Union released a video of his arrest, which closely resembled the spontaneous detentions of Ms. Ozturk and Mr. Mahdawi.
In a statement in April, Mr. Suri said he had “never even been to a protest.” The petition for his release filed by his lawyers suggested that he was more likely targeted because of his marriage to a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent who has been scrutinized by conservative outlets over her family’s ties to Hamas.
Mr. Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader whom Israel assassinated last year in Iran.
The petition by his lawyers stated that both Mr. Suri and his wife had been subject to online harassment over their speech in support of Palestinians. Ms. Saleh’s photo and a dossier about her work at Al Jazeera and her past social media posts appeared on a list published by the Canary Mission, a shadowy group that says its mission is to single out those who promote antisemitism. Civil rights advocates have accused the group of doxxing critics of Israel.
Several other academics who were targeted by immigration enforcement this year have also had their profiles appear on the Canary Mission, which the complaint described as an “anonymously run blacklisting site.”
Mr. Suri’s trial has attracted significant interest in recent weeks, with several dozen supporters regularly crowding into the courthouse to follow the proceedings that he has been unable to have access to while in detention.
During a hearing last week, Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr., Democrat of Virginia, crammed in along with a crowd of students and colleagues of Mr. Suri’s from Georgetown. Nader Hashemi, the director of the center at Georgetown that hosted Mr. Suri, and who recently published a firsthand account of visiting Mr. Suri in the Texas detention center, was also in attendance on Wednesday.
Mr. Suri still faces a parallel immigration case in Texas that stems from the government’s effort to remove him from the country, and that Judge Giles noted was “totally separate” from the case in Virginia. The case in Virginia focuses only on his constitutional claims and challenges his abrupt detention without any criminal charges pending against him.
Last week, a lawyer for the Justice Department said that whatever decision Judge Giles reached, the government had “no plan” to immediately remove him from the country without due process.
“I don’t know if I’m going to rely on that, but thank you,” Judge Giles replied.
The decision came as other courts have taken a skeptical view of the Trump administration’s legal basis for keeping foreign academics in detention over their ties to pro-Palestinian movements.
A federal judge recently ordered Mr. Mahdawi, a student at Columbia University who had organized pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus, released on bail. Mr. Mahdawi, a green card holder who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, was on his way to an appointment toward obtaining U.S. citizenship in Vermont when he was taken into custody by immigration authorities.
A lawsuit before a judge in Massachusetts has sought to bar the State Department and immigration enforcement agencies from targeting foreign students because of their speech or activism more generally.
In April, the judge in that case denied a request by the government to dismiss the suit, finding that it raised “novel First Amendment issues,” and scheduled a trial to discuss them in July.
