Nader Hashemi writes:

In March, Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was arrested by federal agents. The nature and circumstances of his detention parallel the cases of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts.

I am the academic director of the center at Georgetown that hosted Badar Khan Suri as a postdoctoral fellow — the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. I recently went to visit him at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Texas where he is being held. I flew to Dallas, rented a car and then drove 50 minutes south to Alvarado. I was his first visitor since his arrest. We spoke through a glass window for over an hour. This is what he told me.

On March 17, around 8:30 p.m., Badar left campus after teaching his class and breaking his fast. It was the middle of Ramadan, and the sun had just set. Three masked ICE agents were waiting for him outside his home in Arlington, Virginia, where he lived with his wife and their three young children. Badar’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent and the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, who before being assassinated by Israel in 2024 was political leader of Hamas and also served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2006-2007. Pro-Israel groups such as Canary Mission published a series of videos and articles targeting Saleh and her family before her husband’s arrest. Badar was accosted and thrown into the back of an SUV with tinted windows, and his passport was seized. He was told he would be deported immediately.

As he recounted the events of that fateful night, he recalled one masked agent telling him a deportation order had been issued against him a week prior. “I’m innocent, I’m innocent, what did I do?” he kept insisting, but to no avail. At the first ICE facility he was taken to, in Virginia, he was told by the arresting agent that they knew he was not a criminal but that someone at a senior level at the secretary of state’s office “does not want you here.” He was moved to multiple different ICE facilities — three in Virginia and two in Louisiana — before he ended up in Texas.

A particularly painful memory came flooding back. It was when he was being flown from one detention facility to another, unsure of his destiny, with hands tied and feet shackled. He feared he was being sent out of the country. He requested to go to the bathroom and asked the security guard to untie his hands. A firm “no” came in response. “How am I supposed to relieve myself with my hands tied?” Badar asked. “Not my problem,” the guard replied.

As he recounted his ordeal, he told me his fellowship at Georgetown was partially subsidized by the Scholars at Risk program. This is a U.S.-based network that works with American universities to temporarily host international scholars facing threats in their home countries. Badar never imagined that a country with a Scholars at Risk program would one day pose a risk to scholars, he told me. [Continue reading…]