By Nate Raymond
Sept 22 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's administration has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a decision that led to the release of a Georgetown University scholar who had advocated for Palestinian rights and opposed Israel's war in Gaza.
The Department of Justice on Monday asked the high court to consider whether federal immigration law barred 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 US 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.
He was brought to Texas after his detention, and freed in May 2025 on the orders of a district court judge, on the grounds that he was likely to succeed in proving his arrest was in retaliation for his constitutionally protected speech. The Trump administration has argued that the judge should not have interfered in the case.
A 2-1 panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in July ruled in Suri's case that 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.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer in Monday's petition argued that the 4th Circuit's ruling was wrong and risked disrupting immigration enforcement nationwide by giving detainees a means to challenge their deportations outside of immigration court.
"That is all practically disastrous," he wrote.
He noted that a different appeals court had reached the opposite conclusion earlier this year when it overturned a ruling that had led to the release of another pro-Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil, who had attended Columbia University.
Khalil's lawyers have said they plan to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court, and Sauer in Monday's filing argued that the justices should take up that case as well as Suri's to ensure that the issue can be resolved once and for all.
Suri's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Suri 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. At the time of his arrest, he had resided in Virginia with his wife, a US citizen.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in BostonEditing by Peter Graff)
