A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration's attempt to redetain a Georgetown University scholar who was arrested by ICE last year as part of the administration's campaign to crack down on foreign nationals who expressed pro-Palestinian views.
Suri's Arrest and Detention
Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at the university who is married to a US citizen, was arrested in March 2025 and detained for nearly six weeks at a Texas detention center before a federal court ordered him released on bail. The fourth circuit court's decision on Thursday upheld that ruling and rejected the government's attempt to move the case from Virginia to Texas.
The 2-1 decision is a win for individuals in immigration custody who seek to challenge their detention through the federal courts system and by invoking the constitutional principle of 'habeas corpus', which allows all individuals detained by the government to challenge their detention in court.
Conflicting Rulings
The ruling follows two earlier ones by other appeals courts considering similar cases that reached the opposite conclusion, teeing up a likely supreme court decision on the matter. In January, a different decision ruled in favor of the government in a similar appeal brought against former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. And earlier this week, a third appeals court reached the same conclusion in a ruling against Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian student at Columbia whom the government also detained last year.
In those cases, the judges reviewing the appeals sided with the government's position that the judges who ordered Khalil and Mahdawi's releases had overstepped their authority by intervening before the cases had moved fully through the immigration court system – a process the Trump administration controls through the Department of Justice and which critics have long denounced as political.
Implications for Detained Immigrants
Immigration cases can take months or years to resolve, and those rulings would effectively make it impossible for those held in immigration detention to seek redress in federal court. Khalil's lawyers have said they will seek review from the supreme court; a decision in his case will have implications for Khan Suri, Mahdawi and other detained immigrants seeking intervention from federal courts.
Addressing the court's decision in Khalil's case, the panel of judges reviewing Suri's plainly stated: 'We disagree'. They called that reading of the law 'absurd'.
'[In] our view,' the court wrote, 'denying judicial review of detention claims like Suri's misreads Congress' statutes and undermines the protections guaranteed all persons on American soil by the writ of habeas corpus.'
'If a noncitizen is challenging their detention pending removal, then waiting for their removal proceedings does them no good,' the panel added, noting that such a position would make cases in which immigration detention is wielded in unconstitutional ways 'effectively unreviewable'.
The justice department and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond for a request for comment.
Reactions
Noor Zafar, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, hailed the appeals court decision. 'The federal government cannot do an end run around the First Amendment by locking people up for their speech and denying them their day in court,' she said in a statement. 'Immigration laws cannot be abused to silence dissent.'
Suri was targeted by the administration over his social media criticism of Israel's war on Gaza, including concern he expressed for his Palestinian-American wife's family there.
In a statement, he said that the appeals court's ruling reaffirmed 'that an independent judiciary remains the truest guardian of liberty, due process, and the rule of law'.
'Be courageous and stand for justice,' he added. 'Free Palestine.'
