“Trump has made no effort to disguise the fact that the arrests of academics like (Badar Khan) Suri and Mahmoud Khalil is intended to have a chilling effect and discourage the free expression of political views which Trump dislikes,” Virginia US Rep. Don Beyer said.
The Trump administration detained a man without charges outside his home in Rosslyn, Va. in what appears to be a chilling continuation of the president’s right-wing assault on free speech.
The Department of Homeland Security has detained Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University where he studies and teaches. Suri is an Indian citizen studying at Georgetown on a J-1 visa.
Virginia US Rep. Don Beyer said Suri’s detention is a clear violation of his constitutional rights and called for his release.
“Mr. Suri is here lawfully and is not accused of a crime, yet he was surrounded outside the Northern Virginia home where he lives with his wife – an American citizen – and their children, arrested by masked authorities without explanation, disappeared, imprisoned, denied access to legal counsel, and had his student visa revoked,” Beyer said in a statement.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, said on X that Suri was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” McLaughlin did not offer any examples to support her claim.
“Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” McLaughlin said in her post.
Suri does not have a criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, according to The New York Times. Politico first reported the news of Suri’s detention.
Suri’s lawyer told the Times that he denied all of McLaughlin’s allegations and that they seem to stem from who his father-in-law is. Suri’s wife is Palestinian American and her father, Ahmed Yousef, is a former advisor to a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in Iran last year.
Yousef left his position in Hamas more than a decade ago and has publicly criticized the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He told the Times that Suri was not involved in any political activism, including for Hamas.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had deemed Suri “deportable” under what the Times called “a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.” It’s the same legal measure that the Trump administration is trying to use to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident and prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University. The provision says that the Secretary of State can begin deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence is deemed a threat to the US’s foreign policy interests.
Trump said earlier this month that Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.”
Rep. Beyer called the Trump administration’s moves to deport these men without charges “authoritarianism” that establishes a “horrifying precedent” that could lead to more persecution.
“Trump has made no effort to disguise the fact that the arrests of academics like Suri and Mahmoud Khalil is intended to have a chilling effect and discourage the free expression of political views which Trump dislikes,” Beyer said.
