Academics and activists on the American left are rallying behind Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University scholar with family ties to a senior Hamas figure, casting him as a victim of right-wing smears and government overreach—despite his open promotion of the terror group’s propaganda. While Georgetown issued a public statement, it did not respond to Middle East Forum’s request for comment.
Despite the revelations, Suri maintains his position as Postdoctoral Fellow whose specializations include “Middle East, Peace, Religion, South Asia, Violence” at Georgetown.
Suri, an Indian National who is married to Mapheze Saleh, the daughter of a senior Hamas official, was arrested on March 17 by U.S. immigration authorities and now faces deportation. His arrest followed a Middle East Forum exposé revealing his history of spreading virulent antisemitism on social media.
The Alwaleed Center for Muslim and Christian Understanding (ACMCU) released a statement condemning Suri’s arrest, declaring it “must be understood in the context of the Trump Administration’s foreign and domestic policies. Specifically, U.S. support for genocide abroad and McCarthyism at home.”
The center further demanded that Suri be “immediately released. He has committed no crime.” However, Suri’s detention was executed under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 237(a)(4)(C)(i), which allows for deportation of “[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
While ACMCU invoked academic freedom in its defense of Suri, it failed to address the documented evidence compiled by Middle East Forum that demonstrates his sharing propaganda defending Hamas, a terrorist organization that has kidnapped and murdered U.S. citizens. This included Suri’s social media activity, which featured Hamas propaganda glorifying terrorists responsible for the October 7 attacks—atrocities that involved the murder of children and hostage-taking. Additionally, he had posted claims denying reports of Hamas beheading babies, committing mass rapes, or carrying out mass killings at the Nova Music Festival.
Nader Hashemi, director of ACMCU, where Suri works, likened Suri’s arrest to “what they do in Putin’s Russia. That’s what they do in Xi Jinping’s China,” he said. “That’s what they do in the Islamic Republic of Iran, not in the United States, at least until now.”
In an email to faculty members, quoted by The Hoya, Georgetown’s internal magazine, Joel Hellman, Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service—where Suri previously worked—stated, “Khan Suri has not posed a danger to the Georgetown community and reaffirmed the university’s commitment to free speech.” This framing of the controversy as a free speech issue, rather than an endorsement of terrorism, has become a recurring theme in Suri’s defense.
Suri’s legal team has also pushed this narrative. Attorney Nermeen Arastu stated, “Each week, families are torn apart by policies that weaponize immigration enforcement to silence dissent.” In an interview with ABC News, Arastu described Suri’s arrest as an “ICE kidnapping,” asserting, “Every week, thousands of families are torn apart as ICE agents detain individuals without cause, often for no reason other than their political beliefs. This is part of a larger pattern of racially motivated attacks on immigrant communities under the Trump administration.”
A palestinian student from Columbia University, Mahmood Khalil, has also been arrested following his involvement in pro-palestinian protests last spring and claimed he is a “political prisoner.” A Qatari media outlet, The Middle East Eye framed Suri’s situation in this context, saying Suri’s arrest “comes amid a wave of attacks on the academic freedom of pro-palestinian voices in the US that have only escalated since the re-election of Trump.”
As Suri’s case plays out in court, it underscores deeper tensions over academic institutions’ ties to extremism and the boundaries of free speech. Georgetown’s silence—coupled with ACMCU’s outright defense—raises serious questions about the university’s position on national security and the broader influence of Islamist ideologies in American academia.
