WASHINGTON: A federal judge ordered President Donald Trump’s administration not to deport Badar Khan Suri, an Indian man studying at Washington’s Georgetown University whose lawyer has said the United States was seeking to remove him after it accused him of harming US foreign policy.
The order is to remain in effect until lifted by the court, according to the three-paragraph order by US District Judge Patricia Giles in Alexandria, Virginia.
The Department of Homeland Security has accused Badar Khan Suri of ties to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and said he had spread Hamas propaganda and antisemitism on social media. On March 15, Secretary of State Marco Rubio determined Suri could be deported for those activities, according to DHS.
Suri is living in the US on a student visa and is married to an American citizen and has been detained in Alexandria, Louisiana, according to his lawyer. He is awaiting a court date in immigration court, his lawyer said.
Federal agents arrested him outside his home in Rosslyn, Virginia, on Monday night. The lawyer welcomed Thursday’s ruling and called it “the first bit of due process Dr. Khan Suri has received since he was snatched from his family Monday night.”
The American Civil Liberties Union also defended Suri and said he was “transferred to multiple immigration detention centers” before being taken to Alexandria, Louisiana.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s court order.
The case comes as Trump seeks to deport foreigners who took part in pro-Palestinian protests against US ally Israel’s war in Gaza following an October 2023 Hamas attack. Trump’s measures have sparked outcry from civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups who accuse his administration of unfairly targeting political critics by invoking rarely used laws.
Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the university’s School of Foreign Service.
Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is a US citizen, said his lawyer. Saleh is from Gaza, according to the Georgetown University website, which said she has written for Al Jazeera and Palestinian media outlets and worked with the foreign ministry in Gaza. Saleh has not been arrested, the lawyer added.
The lawyer had said on Wednesday Suri was being targeted for his wife’s Palestinian heritage and for his own pro-Palestinian views.
Some media outlets, including the Washington Post, reported that Ahmed Yousef, the father of Suri’s wife, was a former political adviser to Hamas. Yousef had also written for some Western publications like The Guardian.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration arrested and sought to deport Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil over his participation in pro-Palestinian protests. Khalil was moved to Louisiana and is challenging his detention in court.
Trump, without evidence, has accused Khalil of supporting Hamas. Khalil’s legal team says he has no links to the militant group that the US designates as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Trump has alleged pro-Palestinian protesters are antisemitic. Pro-Palestinian advocates, including some Jewish groups, say that their criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza and their support for Palestinian rights are wrongly conflated with antisemitism by their critics.
US judge bars deportation of pro-Palestinian Georgetown University student
https://arab.news/m4c2d
US judge bars deportation of pro-Palestinian Georgetown University student
- Badar Khan Suri being targeted for wife’s Palestinian heritage and for pro-Palestinian views, lawyer says
- US Homeland Department alleges Suri, an Indian studying at Washington’s Georgetown University, has ties to Hamas
US envoys juggle two crisis talks, raising questions about prospects for success
- “Trump seems more focused on quantity over quality instead of the difficult detailed work of diplomacy,” said Bruen
- A regional official close to Iran’s leadership said the US team’s double agenda in Geneva reinforced doubts
WASHINGTON/GENEVA/DUBAI: Even for a US president long fixated on deal-making, Donald Trump’s assignment of his favorite envoys to juggle two sets of negotiations – the Iranian nuclear standoff and Russia’s war in Ukraine — in a single day in Geneva has left many in the foreign policy world scratching their heads.
The shuttle diplomacy on Tuesday by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has raised questions not only about whether they are overstretched and outmatched, but about their serious prospects for resolving either of the twin crises, experts say.
Trump, who has frequently boasted about having ended multiple wars and conflicts in the first year of his second four-year term, has made clear he is looking to add more international deals that he can tout in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the high-stakes negotiations over the two long-running issues were arranged quickly, and the choice of Geneva as the setting for both was never clearly explained, except for the city’s long history of hosting international diplomacy.
“Trump seems more focused on quantity over quality instead of the difficult detailed work of diplomacy,” said Brett Bruen, who was a foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration and now heads the Global Situation Room strategic consultancy. “Tackling both issues at the same time in the same place doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Iran was the opening act in a carefully choreographed diplomatic dance in Geneva, where talks took place under high security in two locations on different sides of the Swiss, French-speaking city.
After 3-1/2 hours of indirect discussions between the US team and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi mediated by Oman, both sides indicated that some progress was made, but there was no suggestion that an agreement was imminent in the longstanding dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
As long as the diplomatic process continues, Trump can keep expanding his massive military buildup near Iran, making clear that use of force remains on the table. That is likely to keep the Middle East on edge, with many fearing that US strikes could escalate into a wider regional war.
’OVERSTRETCH’?
With barely a pause on Tuesday, the US delegates went straight from the Iran talks at Oman’s diplomatic mission to the five-star InterContinental hotel for the first of two days of Russia-Ukraine negotiations over a war that Trump, during the 2024 presidential campaign, had promised to end in a day.
Expectations were low for a breakthrough in the latest round of talks to end Europe’s biggest war since World War Two ended in 1945.
A regional official close to Iran’s leadership said the US team’s double agenda in Geneva reinforced doubts about whether Washington was sincere about either of the diplomatic efforts.
“The approach risks overstretch,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. “It resembles an emergency room with two critically ill patients and a single doctor unable to give either case sustained attention, increasing the likelihood of failure.”
Mohanad Hajj-Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut said there was too much at stake in the Iran crisis for the US to handle diplomacy this way.
“Having a team of Witkoff and Kushner tasked with resolving all the world’s problems is, frankly, a shocking reality,” he said.
Some experts said the two, both from Trump’s world of New York real estate development, lack the depth of knowledge and experience to go up against veteran negotiators like Araqchi and their Russian interlocutors and that they were in over their heads in such complicated conflicts.
Absent from the Geneva meetings was US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s top diplomat, who is known as a foreign policy wonk.
Asked for comment, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump and his team “have done more than anyone to bring both sides together to stop the killing and deliver a peace deal” in Ukraine. She denounced anonymous “critics” of the president’s approach but did not provide answers to Reuters’ specific questions for this story.
’ENVOY FOR EVERYTHING’
Administration officials have long defended Witkoff and Kushner’s roles, citing their skills as dealmakers, the trust Trump puts in them, and the failings over the years of more traditional diplomatic approaches. Witkoff, a longtime Trump friend often called the “envoy for everything” due to his broad remit, played a key role in securing a ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza war, though progress has stalled toward a more permanent resolution. His diplomatic efforts with Iran and Russia have had little success so far.
In Trump’s first term, Kushner spearheaded the Abraham Accords, under which several Arab states forged landmark diplomatic relations with Israel. But the pact has not advanced much since Trump returned to office nearly 13 months ago.
Kushner and Witkoff’s ability to handle their latest diplomatic tasks has been undercut by Trump’s stripping down of the government’s foreign policy apparatus, both at the State Department and the National Security Council, where many veteran staffers were sent packing, some analysts say.
”We’ve seen a hollowing-out of our diplomatic bench,” said former Obama foreign policy adviser Bruen. “So there’s a question of whether we still have the right people to work on these big issues.”
