Georgetown scholar recalls terror and ‘mockery of due process’ in immigration jail

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — One of the lowest moments of Badar Khan Suri’s two months in federal custody was being crammed onto an airplane with hundreds of other shackled prisoners.

The Trump administration was trying to deport the Georgetown University scholar over statements he made against Israel’s war in Gaza. The guards wouldn’t say where they were headed, but the Indian national was convinced it was out of the United States.

Then Khan Suri had to use the plane’s bathroom. He said the guards refused to unshackle his wrists.

“They said, ‘No, you have to use it like this or do it in your trousers,’” Khan Suri recalled of the trip, taking him to a Louisiana detention center. “They were behaving as if we were animals.”

Khan Suri, 41, was released on bond last week as his lawsuit against the U.S.’s deportation case continues. In an interview with The Associated Press, he spoke Thursday of repeated lies by prison guards who said he could talk to his wife when he couldn’t. His living quarters were a cramped open cell with a toilet where he worried and waited anxiously, fearful about what would happen next.

Speaking with The AP, he addressed the Trump administration’s accusations that he spread “Hamas propaganda.” Khan Suri said he only spoke in support of Palestinians, who are going through an “unprecedented, livestreamed genocide.”

“I don’t support Hamas,” he said. “I support Palestine. I support Palestinians. And it is so deceiving for some people who just publish canards … They will just replace Palestine with Hamas.”

Yet, because of his comments, he said U.S. authorities treated him as if he had committed a high-level crime. Fellow inmates said his red uniform was reserved for the most dangerous offenders.

“I said, ’No, I’m just a university teacher. I did nothing,” Khan Suri recalled.

Still, there were rays of hope. He said more than a hundred people from the Georgetown community wrote letters on his behalf to the federal judge overseeing his case, including some who are Jewish.

A crowd also greeted him when he arrived back in Virginia.

“Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims — everyone together,” said Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow who studies religion, peace and violence. “That is the reality I want to live with. That’s the reality I want to die for. Those people together.”

‘I was not in Russia or North Korea’

U.S. Immigration authorities have detained international college students from across the country — many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war — since the early days of Trump’s second administration.

The administration has said it revoked Khan Suri’s visa because he was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” while also citing his connections to “a senior advisor to Hamas,” which court records indicate is his wife Mapheze Saleh’s father.

Saleh is a Palestinian American whose father worked with the Hamas-backed Gazan government in the early 2000s, but before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Khan Suri’s attorneys have said. They also said he barely knew his father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef.

Khan Suri’s attorneys said he wouldn’t comment on Yousef during Thursday’s interview, which mostly covered his arrest and time in custody. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Khan Suri’s statements.

Khan Suri said he was arrested just after he taught his weekly class on minority rights and the majority. Masked police in plain clothes pulled up in an unmarked car outside his suburban Washington home.

They showed no documentation, such as a warrant, he said. Other than saying his visa was being revoked, they refused to explain the reason for his arrest. He described it as a “kidnapping.”

“This is not some authoritarian regime,” Khan Suri said. “I was not in Russia or North Korea. I was in the best place in the world. So, I was shocked.”

‘How can this be happening?’

As police whisked him away, Khan Suri realized they wanted to deport him.

The “dehumanizing procedures” came next: A finger scan, a DNA cotton swab and chains binding his wrists, waist and ankles, he said. They also said he could talk to his wife at a detention center in Virginia, but “that never happened.”

He said he slept on a floor without a blanket and used a toilet monitored by a camera. The next day, he said he and other detainees were placed in a van, which soon rolled up to an airplane.

“I asked them where I am going now? Nobody would reply anything,” Khan Suri said. “They just pushed us in.”

He said the bathroom situation did not get better at a federal detention center in Louisiana, where Khan Suri was taken next. It lacked a privacy barrier and was also watched by a camera.

He was finally able to call his wife, but he said she couldn’t hear him. Khan Suri said he was “extremely terrified,” thinking that someone was making his family not reply.

He was not able to speak to a lawyer, while fellow inmates said everyone there is deported within three days, Khan Suri said.

“I was crying from inside, ‘How can this be happening?” he said. “A few hours back, I was in Georgetown teaching my students, talking about peace and conflict analysis.”

Through the abyss

Khan Suri said his first seven or eight days of captivity were the same: “Same terror. Same fear. Same uncertainty. Same mockery of rule of law.”

“I was going more and more deeper, reaching to my abyss,” he added. “And I was discovering that the abyss also has more and more depth.”

But he was still praying five times a day, uncertain which direction Mecca was.

“I was very strong like that, that God will help me. American Constitution will help me. American people will help me,” he said.

Afterward, Khan Suri was transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where he said he slept on the floor of a crowded cell for the first two weeks. Eventually, he got his own cot.

And, finally, he was allowed to speak to his attorneys, which he said led to a change in treatment. He soon received a Quran and then a prayer rug. As for the rug, he rolled it up like it was his son.

“My eyes would become wet, and I would give that blanket a hug as my son so that this hug should reach him,” Khan Suri said. “And when I came back, he told me the same, that he was hugging a pillow.”

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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.