On Wednesday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered immigration authorities to release Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri from custody. The Indian scholar’s release followed that of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student from Turkey, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University student. The administration is seeking to deport all of them on the grounds that their presence in the US is harmful to the country’s foreign policy, part of a crackdown on political dissent that has sent shockwaves through US campuses.
Only the first foreign student to be detained by the administration over his activism, Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident of Palestinian descent, remains in detention more than two months after being taken from his Columbia University residential building.
“These decisions reflect a simple truth – the constitution forbids the government from locking up anyone, including noncitizens, just because it doesn’t like what they have to say”, said Brian Hauss, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups representing Khalil and the others. “We will not rest until Mahmoud Khalil is free, along with everyone else in detention for their political beliefs”.
The arrests have prompted widespread anxiety among international students and scholars and significantly contributed to a climate of fear and repression on US campuses. Despite occasional efforts to revive it, last year’s mass campus protest movement has been significantly dampened, even as Israel’s war in Gaza – the focus of the protests – is only escalating.
But while the Trump administration seems to be getting clobbered in court. The government hasn’t clearly defended its position. In an appeal hearing this month in Öztürk and Mahdawi’s cases, one of the judges on the panel asked the government’s lawyers whether the administration believed the students’ speech to be protected by the first amendment’s guarantees of free speech and expression.
US district court judge Geoffrey Crawford, who ordered Mahdawi’s release, compared the current political moment with the red scare and Palmer raids of the early 20th century, when US officials detained and deported hundreds of foreign nationals suspected of holding leftist view. ”We will not fear anyone because our fight is a fight for love, is a fight for democracy, is a fight for humanity,” Mahdawi said at a press conference upon his release.
Source: The Guardian
