By Nate Raymond
July 23 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Thursday rejected an effort by President Donald Trump's administration to allow immigration authorities to re-detain a Georgetown University scholar who had advocated for Palestinian rights and opposed Israel's war in Gaza.
A 2-1 panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal immigration law did not bar a lower-court judge from ordering Badar Khan Suri released after hearing his claims that his detention
violated his due process and free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution.
The Indian citizen had been arrested by immigration authorities in March 2025 as the Trump administration pursued a campaign to detain and deport foreign nationals who had engaged in pro-Palestinian activism on their college campuses.
Two other federal appeals courts have recently overturned decisions by lower-court judges that had led to the release of pro-Palestinian campus activists who had attended Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.
But the 4th Circuit panel disagreed with those courts' conclusions that immigration law stripped lower-court judges of jurisdiction to hear a case like Suri's, saying nothing prevented a judge from hearing a challenge to someone's allegedly unconstitutional detention even if it related to deportation proceedings pending before the immigration courts.
"Whether the Government has chosen to detain Suri to punish his speech and associations and to chill and deter future speech, and whether it constitutionally may do so, are different questions from whether the Government has and may seek to remove Suri because of his speech and associations," U.S. Circuit Judge DeAndrea Benjamin wrote for the court.
Both judges in the majority were appointed by Democratic presidents. U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, dissented, calling the ruling "a loss for the immigration system Congress carefully designed."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, did not respond to a request for comment.
"Today reaffirms my faith that an independent judiciary remains the truest guardian of liberty, due process, and the rule of law," Suri said in a statement.
Suri at the time of his arrest had resided in Virginia with his wife, a Palestinian U.S. citizen. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown's Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, part of the Jesuit university's School of Foreign Service.
After ICE took him into custody, he was moved to Texas, where he was freed in May 2025 after U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered him released on the grounds that he was likely to succeed in proving his arrest was in retaliation for his constitutionally protected speech.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
