ICE Snatched a Georgetown Postdoc. I Visited Him in Jail.

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 University.

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, Va., 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 the political leader of Hamas and also served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2006-7. 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 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, Badar told me his fellowship at Georgetown was partially subsidized by the Scholars at Risk program. Based in the United States, this network 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.

The first 10 days in Texas were a nightmare. He was forced to sleep on the floor of a communal room with a TV blaring nonstop and the lights on 24/7. He got little sleep during this time. Now he is in a general dormitory, but he has been designated a high-risk detainee. A dark-red prison outfit is the required attire; he is entitled to a mere two hours of fresh air per week. There are gangs in the prison, and the high-carb diet he is fed has exacerbated his health issues. His pleas for medical attention have gone unanswered.

What struck me about Badar was his overall mood. He was defiant and eager to clear his name. The Trump administration has charged him with “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” He strongly rejects the accusations. He told me he condemns the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel on moral and strategic grounds, yet he made a point of stating that he supports the right of all colonized people, including Palestinians, to resist oppression — but within a Gandhian framework.

The Mahatma came up several times. Gandhi is Badar’s lodestar. “Gandhi went to jail, Mandela went to jail,” he told me, “and now I am in jail.” He recalled a line, often attributed to Gandhi, that inspires him: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” (The actual source of the quote was Nicholas Klein, a trade-union activist, who said something similar in a 1918 speech: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”) Badar’s body language and demeanor changed when he shared the quote.

In fact, his fellow inmates call him Gandhi. He knows this terrain well, given his Indian background and his doctorate from the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Jamia Millia Islamia, in New Delhi. He bides his time by providing short tutorials for other prisoners on Gandhi’s thinking about social and political justice. He is also assisting his fellow inmates with written correspondence with their lawyers. His doctorate makes him the most educated person in the prison, and he is using his education in the service of others.

One part of our conversation keeps playing in my mind. If his suffering “can help expose the naked authoritarianism in America today and keep the spotlight on the genocide in Gaza, it will be worth it,” he said.

The Trump administration’s accusations of antisemitism against Badar are ludicrous. He is critical of Israeli policy, but to conflate this with antisemitism or to suggest that his presence on campus has threatened the safety of Jewish students is to stretch credulity to its breaking point.

Badar is not an organizer, nor was he politically active. He didn’t attend any of the Gaza encampment protests. On Georgetown’s campus, he has kept a low profile, focusing on his teaching, his research, and raising his young family. Our center has co-sponsored a lecture series on Gaza since October 7, 2023. I have no recollection of seeing Badar at any of these events.

By Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s standards, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz — all Jews — could be accused of antisemitism and denied entry into the United States. If they were on American soil, they would have likely met the same fate as Badar. This point was acknowledged recently by over 170 members of Georgetown’s Jewish community in a statement condemning Badar’s arrest.

Before I said goodbye, Badar asked me to send him four books: George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, and two by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. He has since confirmed receipt.

I will leave it to my readers to reach their own conclusions about what these requests reveal about Badar’s thinking and his predicament. I will also leave it to my readers to decide what they reveal about his jailers in the Trump administration and this deeply fraught moment in American history.

On May 6, Badar Khan Suri will appear before a federal immigration judge to determine his fate.

A version of this essay originally appeared in New Lines Magazine.