Just after sunset on March 17, three federal immigration officers arrested Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia.
Suri had just returned from an Iftar meal with his wife and three children when three masked agents approached him, told him his J-1 visa had been revoked, and took him into custody without explanation or formal charges.
His family watched helplessly as he was taken away.
The arrest comes amid growing concerns from legal scholars and civil rights advocates who warn that free speech on college campuses is under threat. A wave of detentions and deportation proceedings in recent months against student activists and scholars involved in pro-Palestinian mobilization has alarmed legal experts nationwide.
Suri’s arrest has since reverberated throughout the Georgetown community. University faculty reported seeing unfamiliar men patrolling Suri’s office earlier that same day. One of the first to learn of his arrest was Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Center and a close colleague.
“I got a call from his wife in the evening after it had happened,” Hashemi said.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Suri’s arrest is tied to national security concerns stemming from his relationship to his father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef, a former Hamas adviser. However, DHS has not released any public evidence to support claims that Suri was spreading Hamas propaganda or engaging in antisemitic activity on campus or online.
“There’s always been this understanding that you have maximum free speech rights in the United States,” said Hashemi. “But since Trump’s election last November, there’s been a major shift.”
Within 72 hours, Suri was transferred between multiple immigration detention centers and is currently being held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alexandria, Louisiana. His legal team has filed motions to return him to Virginia and release him on bond, while the Department of Justice seeks to dismiss the case or transfer it to Texas. Suri awaits a hearing on May 1 in Virginia.
“Vulnerable groups who are not U.S. citizens, on visas or on green cards, are being arrested and threatened with deportation because they’ve exercised their right to free speech,” said Hashemi.
On April 11, over 130 Georgetown students, faculty and alumni signed a letter published in the campus newspaper The Hoya, condemning Suri’s arrest, warning that recent federal actions are eroding constitutional protections and are in turn making Jewish students on campus less safe. The student senate also passed an act three days after calling for transparency, protection of free speech, and assurances that peaceful protests will not be punished, according to The Georgetown Voice.
“As someone who studies this topic professionally, what I’m seeing happening here right now is very similar to what has happened in other countries where you’ve had elections, but then these elections turn slowly in the direction of an authoritarian transition,” Hashemi said.
Suri’s arrest followed eleven days after the high-profile arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained by ICE in March. A green-card holder and prominent organizer of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University last spring, Khalil has been held for over a month.
Khalil recently described the uncertainty and despair of his detention, drawing comparisons to Viktor Frankl’s account of Nazi concentration camps in a published op-ed for the Washington Post.
Legal experts say the arrests of Suri and Khalil raise urgent questions about whether First Amendment protections are being applied equally to non-citizens, specifically those involved in activism critical of U.S. foreign policy with Gaza.
“In the minds of these extreme audio logs in the Republican Party, to support Palestinian human rights is equal to supporting Hamas,” said Hashemi.
Professor Hashemi says Badar Khan Suri’s detention—like Mahmoud Khalil’s—is part of a larger shift, where universities face increasing pressure to restrict public dissent under the guise of combating anti-semitism. He describes Suri as a serious young academic who focused on his teaching and research, not as a political activist.
“Now I think our free speech is being eroded, Hashemi says. “And of course, one of the things that happens is that you arrest a few people, and everyone else gets scared.”
Many experts point out that the line between free speech and harassment is not always clear.
“It actually makes Jews less safe, because people are seeing in the name of antisemitism, you’re justifying a genocide in Gaza in the name of antisemitism,” said Hashemi. “You’re silencing free speech.”
Professor Howard M. Wasserman, who teaches constitutional law at Florida International University, said the government’s use of immigration enforcement in these cases could have a rippling effect.
“The idea of academic freedom is that the university is this unique, expressive space where ideas should be taught and discussed and written about in the most free and completely open way possible,” Wasserman said. “And that’s one of the things that is being played out in the lawsuits … You know, the extent to which the state can tell professors what they can and cannot say in their classrooms.”
Critics of the administration argue that labeling all criticism of Israel as antisemitic oversimplifies the issue.
“Criticism of Israel, criticism of the Israeli government and how it’s conducting the war in Gaza—a lot of people regard all of that as antisemitic,” added Wasserman. “The problem is figuring out the line between what is protected but hateful speech, and what crosses into harassment.”
Sen. Marco Rubio told the BBC in late March that he personally supports visa revocations for those he considers extremists, saying, “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas. We do it every day.”
Outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., on March 28, protesters rallied the morning of Khalil’s hearing which was held in a federal court in Newark, New Jersey before Judge Michael E. Farbiarz. Organized by activists from Refuse Fascism, they demanded Khalil’s release and denounced what they described as an attack on constitutional rights.
“We’re here with Refuse Fascism to bring up the issue of deported students, or students that it looks like are going to get deported by the Trump administration because they have had the audacity to stand up and say a genocide, the murder, the killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza is wrong,” said Anna Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. diplomat at the protest.
Wright herself was arrested in March after disrupting a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to protest remarks made by Sen. Tom Cotton, who accused the organization she is part of, CODEPINK, of being funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
Other activists say the issue is about more than the individual detentions, pointing instead to a larger principle at stake.
“Just in a minute, in a moment, someone is snatched out of your life, and their whole future is in doubt,” said Cindy L., another Refuse Fascism activist and organizer of the protest. “People should not be treated that way, and that is a basic thing that draws me to all of this.”
For activists who rally for this cause like Anna Wright and Cindy L., the message is clear: Their movement is not going away.
“Stand up, speak out, get in the streets, get in their faces,” Cindy said. “We’re all about peaceful, nonviolent protests. But that doesn’t mean we’re not determined, and that doesn’t mean rolling over on this.”
