Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University scholar from India, who was arrested amid Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students was released from immigration detention on Wednesday
Khan Suri will now go home to his family in Virginia but he is awaiting the decision of his petition against the Trump administration for wrongful arrest and detention.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Khan Suri told reporters after his release from a detention facility in Alvarado, near Dallas. “It took two months, but I’m extremely thankful that finally I’m free.”
Khan Suri is also facing deportation proceedings in an immigration court in Texas.
‘My ankles, my wrist, my body’, Khan Suri claims
Khan Suri was arrested by masked, plain-clothed officers on the evening of March 17 outside his apartment complex in Arlington, Virginia. He was then put on a plane to Louisiana and later to a detention center in Texas.
Speaking about the conditions in which he was subject to, Khan Suri said that during the first several days in ICE custody, he wasn’t sure where he was being taken and was treated like sub human, as reported by NBC News.
“For the first seven, eight days, I even missed my shadow,” he said. “It was Kafka-esqe, where they were taking me, what they were doing to me. I was chained — my ankles, my wrist, my body. Everything was chained.”
Inside the detention center, Khan Suri described the facilities as unhygienic and said he tried to raise his concerns with the ombudsman, but never received a response. He feared whether his three children would be harmed.
Khan Suri said that amid his detention, he was fearful about how his three children would fare.
“I had only worried that, ‘Oh, my kids are suffering because of me,’ My eldest son is only nine, and my twins are only five,” Khan Suri said. “My nine-year-old knows where I am. He was going through very rough times. My wife used to tell me that he was crying. He needs support from mental health.”
The Trump administration has said that it revoked Khan Suri’s visa 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.
Immigration authorities have detained college students from across the country — many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war — since the first days of the Trump administration. Khan Suri is the latest to win release from custody, along with Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University.
(With inputs from NBC News and AP)