US Judge asks govt to answer questions on Indian academic's detention

New York: A judge has given the US government a day’s notice to come up with answers regarding the detention of an Indian academic whose deportation was temporarily blocked.

Federal Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles on Thursday ordered government lawyers to explain why Badar Khan Suri was moved from a detention facility in Virginia, where he lives, to Louisiana and to Texas after his arrest in March.

Immigration authorities want to deport him because they allege that he has links to Hamas, which the US has declared is a Palestinian terrorist organisation.

He is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in Washington.

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Giles, who had earlier stayed his deportation, was hearing an appeal by Suri’s lawyers to bring him back to Virginia and stop his deportation.

Government lawyers want the case against his deportation moved to a court in Texas, where he is now held.

Suri’s lawyers fear that he is at greater risk of being deported because the courts in Texas are considered more conservative and could be sympathetic to the government.

Giles raised questions about the claims of overcrowding in the Virginia detention centre for moving him to a Texas facility where he was given a cot in a TV room, while he had a room to himself in Virginia.

She asked, “Are they moved like that in the middle of the night? Is that normal?”

Suri has a PhD from New Delhi’s Jamia Milia University and was teaching a course on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia’ at Georgetown University.

He is married to a US citizen, Mapheze Saleh whose father Ahmed Yousef was an adviser to the Hamas-run administration in Gaza, creating a link to Hamas in the view of the government.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin accused Suri of disseminating “Hamas propaganda and promoting anti-Semitism on social media.”

There has been an outpouring of support for him, including from some Jewish religious leaders who wrote a letter supporting him.

When his case was being heard in the Alexandria court, his supporters held a demonstration outside to demand his release.

Democrat Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat member of the Virginia State House of Representatives, who addressed the protesters, said, “It is Kafkaesque when somebody can be kidnapped without reason, without acknowledgment, without charges.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has said that it was pausing the deportation of students caught in the deportation dragnet for having committed even minor offences, but it does not seem to apply to those already in the deportation proceedings like Suri.

A judge in Vermont State ordered on Wednesday the release of a Palestinian student with a green card who led the anti-Israel protest at Columbia University pending the final decision on his case.

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