Federal judge rules Georgetown scholar’s wrongful arrest case will stay in Virginia

A federal judge has ruled that a Georgetown scholar’s petition challenging the constitutionality of his arrest should be heard in Virginia, denying the Trump administration’s request to move the case to Texas.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said she would hear arguments in mid-May on whether Badar Khan Suri should be returned to Virginia while his deportation case proceeds in Texas, where he’s now detained. His next hearing in the immigration case is in June.

The judge’s late Tuesday memo says that by swiftly moving Khan Suri from Virginia to Louisiana and then Texas within days of his arrest, the government appeared to be trying to thwart his lawyers’ efforts to challenge his detention in the jurisdiction where it happened.

Khan Suri’s lawyers went to court the day after masked, plain-clothed officers arrested him on the evening of March 17 outside his apartment complex in Arlington, Virginia. Officials said his visa was revoked because of his social media posts and his wife’s connection to Gaza as a Palestinian American. They accused him of supporting Hamas, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

By the time Khan Suri’s petition was filed, authorities had already put him on a plane to Louisiana without allowing him to update his family or lawyer, Khan Suri’s attorneys said. A few days later, he was moved again to Texas.

“This atypical movement would make it difficult for any diligent lawyer’s filings to ’catch up’ to their client’s location,” and followed a pattern now evident in multiple efforts to deport students based on their speech, Giles wrote.

The judge noted that Columbia University scholar Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident with no criminal record who was detained in March over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations was moved within 48 hours of his arrest in Manhattan through lockups in New York, New Jersey, Texas and, then, Louisiana.

She also cited the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was arrested in a Boston suburb, driven New Hampshire and then Vermont, and then flown to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana. A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered ICE to return Ozturk to Vermont.

Each scholar “was arrested on different days and in different regions,” Giles wrote. “What is similar? … the Government attempted to move each outside of their jurisdictions to Louisiana or Texas.”

Unlike the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, the courts in Texas and western Louisiana are dominated by Republican-appointed judges, and any appeals go to the reliably conservative 5th Circuit, where 12 of the 17 full-time appellate judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including six by President Donald Trump.

Khan Suri came from India to the U.S. in 2022 on a J-1 visa. A visiting scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, he taught a course on majority and minority human rights in South Asia, and lived with his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and three children.

U.S. attorneys argued that Khan Suri was quickly moved because a facility in Farmville, Virginia, was overcrowded and a nearby detention center in Caroline County had “no available beds and only had limited emergency bedspace.”

But the judge observed that for weeks thereafter, Khan Suri had to sleep on a plastic cot on the floor of an overcrowded detention center in Texas, and that according to his attorneys, he now sleeps on a bed in an overcrowded dormitory with about 50 other people. The government’s representations, she wrote, “are plainly inconsistent and are further undermined by the fact that Prairieland Detention Center, where Petitioner (Khan Suri) is currently held, is overcrowded.”