After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas — one of whom had recently sued the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds.
DHS agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, outside his home in Virginia on Monday. According to a habeas corpus petition filed by Suri’s attorney, Suri was arrested on the same grounds as Khalil: the secretary of state deemed him a threat to the US’s foreign policy interests. In the petition, which was obtained and first reported on by Politico, Suri’s attorneys say he has “long been doxxed and smeared” by far-right groups.
The petition also claims that Suri is being targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage. Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a US citizen. In February, the official X account of Israel’s US embassy called out Saleh, claiming she was the “daughter of a Hamas senior adviser” and calling her presence at Georgetown an “active threat to Israeli and Jewish students.”
On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia barred DHS from deporting Suri for now. Like Khalil, Suri is being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana, the Times reports.
DHS did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the New York Times that Suri was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media” but provided no further evidence. She also said that Suri has “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior adviser to Hamas.”
Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, denied McLaughlin’s claims, telling the Times that his client had been targeted “seemingly based on who his father-in-law was.”
According to the Times, Saleh’s father, Ahmed Yousef, was formerly an adviser to a Hamas leader but left his position over a decade ago and has publicly criticized Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. Yousef told the Times that Suri is not involved in any “political activism.”
Momodou Taal, a Cornell University student also reportedly targeted by DHS, was involved in political activism. In fact, Taal had recently sued the Trump administration, alleging that he fears “government retaliation” for engaging in “constitutionally protected expression critical of US foreign policy and supportive of Palestinian human rights.” Taal, who is from the United Kingdom, had previously expressed fears that the university’s decision to suspend him and other activists would lead to his student visa being suspended.
In a letter filed in federal court Friday, Taal’s attorneys said the Department of Justice contacted them Thursday night via email to inform them that “the government intended to serve Mr. Taal with a Notice to Appear” in immigration court and take him into ICE custody.
The attorneys “are not aware of any other instance in which the department has attempted to initiate service of an NTA through the Department of Justice in response to the non-citizen filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of presidential action,” Taal’s attorneys wrote.
