She was a translator in Gaza. He was an academic from New Delhi on a humanitarian visit to the Palestinian enclave. Their meeting and marriage made headlines in India, where newspapers described the “Indo-Palestinian love story” as “the stuff of Bollywood movies”.
But the narrative took a bad turn in the USA last month. This time, the headlines were terrifying. The Indian academic, Badar Khan Suri, now a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in Washington DC, was arrested on March 17 outside his home in Virginia. His wife, Mapheze Saleh, a US national of Palestinian origin, was in their apartment when she received a call from Suri around 9pm, asking her to come outside because he was being arrested.
“When I came downstairs, I saw three uniformed, masked agents who were in the process of handcuffing Badar and placing him in a large black SUV,” Saleh told a Washington DC local radio station.
Suri’s detention came a week after Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in New York, part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students in US universities.
In a post on X three days after Suri’s arrest, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said the Georgetown scholar was detained for his "close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, a senior adviser to Hamas".
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Suri denies the allegations. In a Virginia district court filing, his lawyer stated that Suri was targeted because of his wife's Palestinian identity and “the constitutionally protected speech of his wife on behalf of Palestinian human rights".
While Saleh is a US citizen, her Indian husband has been in the US on a J-1 visa for research scholars since 2022, when the couple relocated from Delhi with their three children.
A Bollywood-style love story, kindled in Gaza and legalised at an exuberant Delhi wedding ceremony, is now the subject of scrutiny in the US courts as the Indian academic battles for his liberty and livelihood.
Suri’s lawyers are currently seeking his transfer to Virginia, where a federal judge is considering a motion to release him on bond while litigation proceeds. The Georgetown fellow was taken to a detention facility in Louisiana after his arrest. Days later, he was transferred to an immigrant detention centre in Alvarado, Texas, even as his lawyers were battling for Virginia jurisdiction for his case.
He is just one in hundreds of foreign students and scholars whose lives have been upended by arrests, often with little warning and few details about why they were being detained. The crackdown has sparked alarm bells across the globe, particularly among students considering a US education. In Suri’s home country, India, which sends the largest number of international students to America, enrollments at US universities are falling just as many educational institutions are facing federal funding cuts under the Trump administration.
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The disproportionate number of students of colour who have been targeted for participating in campus demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians has also sent a chilling message in Global South countries, where the US was once admired for its diversity and liberties.
An ‘epic’ bus trip to Gaza
At the heart of the Trump administration case against Suri lies the allegation that the Indian academic has links to Hamas, a designated terrorist group in the US. Both Suri and Columbia student activist Khalil have been detained under a rarely used provision of a 1950s McCarthy-era immigration law that enables the deportation of immigrants who have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the US.
The families and friends of the two detained men vehemently deny the allegations, which will be up to the US courts to decide.
For Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, it’s a cruel twist in an academic career focused on peace and conflict resolution studies.
His journey began in December 2010, when as a master’s student in a Delhi university, Suri joined a humanitarian convoy of Asian activists to Gaza. It was at a time when Israel had imposed yet another blockade on the Palestinian enclave, prompting activists in many countries to organise “freedom flotillas” to deliver aid.
“We Indian social activists certainly did not have the resources to organise a flotilla, but we decided to organise a land convoy, in which we travelled across the borders by bus,” said Feroze Mithiborwala, one of the caravan's organisers. Dubbed a “bus yatra”, using the Hindi word for procession, the convoy was “organised in the tradition that was part of our Gandhian legacy and that of our national freedom movement”, noted the Mumbai-based activist.
In keeping with their peace message, the Indian delegation left from Mahatma Gandhi’s cremation spot in New Delhi, joining up with activists from 15 other countries in what was dubbed “the first Asian convoy to Gaza”.
The convoy – which included prominent activists such as a former Indian parliamentarian and a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called “the Asian Nobel prize” – finally made it into the besieged enclave in January 2011 after what Mithiborwala called “a momentous and epic journey”.
Nearly 15 years later, Mithiborwala remembers Suri as an “intelligent and well-mannered” young student. “We had some good delegates, young delegates, he was definitely one of these thinking types,” he recounted.
‘Targeted’ for his marriage
The Asian peace delegation spent a few days in Gaza, during which time, Suri met his future wife. Mapheze Saleh is the daughter of Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader who was assassinated in an Israeli strike last year.
“In India, Hamas or Hezbollah are not proscribed or terrorist organisations, so there was nothing wrong then,” said Mithiborwala. “Now some family member somewhere was an adviser [to a Hamas official] – okay, but for him to be targeted is atrocious actually. The point is, has he violated any American law? And the answer is no. They really have no basis in American law.”
In a message to the New York Times from Gaza last month, Yousef confirmed that Suri is his son-in-law and said his daughter’s husband was not involved in any “political activism,” including on behalf of Hamas.
In a court statement, Saleh said her father left the Gaza government in 2010 and "started the House of Wisdom in 2011 to encourage peace and conflict resolution in Gaza".
Suri has no criminal record, nor has he been charged since his March 17 detention. A close friend of the Indian academic, who declined to be named due to fear of trolling and surveillance, dismissed the Trump administration’s allegations of Suri’s political links to Hamas. “They are trying to link him with his father-in-law, they’re just targeting him due to his marriage,” he said. “He's been targeted for his identity and for marrying a Palestinian girl.”
The rights of noncitizen residents
Since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to begin a crackdown on what he called anti-Semitism, at least 300 international students and academics have had their US visas revoked.
The figure is likely to be an underestimation. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about it at a press conference on March 27, he was dismissive about the exact number. “Maybe more, it might be more than 300 at this point,” Rubio said. “At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”
Civil and immigrant rights groups however warn that the Trump administration is getting rid of and tearing up fundamental free speech rights guaranteed to citizens and noncitizen residents in the US.
“The Trump administration is claiming the authority to punish and remove noncitizen dissenters at will, without showing any meaningful justification,” said John Raphling, associate US program director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “These actions not only violate the rights of those being targeted, but by intimidating others into silence, they represent a much wider threat to the right to free expression.”
In a statement published on Thursday, Human Rights Watch noted that the under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US ratified in 1992, noncitizens have the right to hold opinions and to express them.
Declining international interest in US universities
It’s an issue that’s being closely monitored in India, where the media has been covering the cases of two Indian nationals targeted in the US campus crackdown.
In addition to Suri, Ranjini Srinivasan, an Indian doctoral candidate at Columbia University, left the US for Canada last month after ICE agents came to her campus apartment twice to try to arrest her.
A leading Indian daily last week reported that hundreds of international students had received emails from the US State Department warning them to self-deport or face arrest and deportation.
In its report, The Times of India published the full contents of the email, which sounded like a compelling incentive to abort plans to study in the US. “Please note that deportation can take place at a time that does not allow the person being deported to secure possessions or conclude affairs in the United States. Persons being deported may be sent to countries other than their countries of origin,” said the emails.
Meanwhile Indian admissions to US universities are falling. India sends the world’s largest number of postgraduate students to foreign universities. In 2023, a whopping 331,602 Indian students pursued higher education degrees in US universities. That figure dropped to 204,058 in 2024, a 13 percent decrease, according to Indian government data.
On a trip to India last month, Clay Harmon, executive director of the Association of International Enrollment Management (AIRC), a membership organisation focused on international students, found recruiting agencies reporting a decline in student interest in US universities. “What they were seeing at the time was students who were kind of taking more of a wait-and-see approach about the US,” he said. “There were, of course, headlines in the Indian media about the changes that the Trump administration was putting into place, et cetera. And so, there was some uncertainty among students.”
Local agents reported an increase in students looking to Europe for their studies. “It sounded like Germany was the main winner there. But of course, we know that Germany does not have the same capacity that the United States has in terms of the number of students that they can possibly host. So, it's still a relatively small group of students who are open to Europe,” he explained.
Harmon’s trip to India was in early March and he was careful to note that, “things are changing so rapidly here in the United States” that the real effects of the Trump administration policies will not be visible until enrollments for the fall semester – which begins in September – end.
The stakes, for many US universities, are high. International students are a lucrative revenue source particularly as domestic enrollments decline and many institutes face federal budget cuts. In the 2023-2024 academic year, 1.1 million international students at US universities contributed $43.8 billion to the nation’s economy and supported more than 378,000 jobs, according to data released by NAFSA, an agency that promotes international education.
“There are so many ways in which the United States relies on international students, some of those benefits which the current administration does not appear to appreciate,” said Harmon. “There are the financial benefits for individual institutions who charge significantly higher fees to international students than they do to local students. And not to mention the actual advantages of having a diverse and globally representative classroom, which benefits domestic students."
Far-right convergences in US, Israel and India
But even as US campus administrators worry about falling foreign enrollments, Suri’s friends back home fervently hope the Georgetown academic will not be deported back to India.
While India has historically supported the Palestinian cause, in recent years Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has developed close, strategic ties with Israel.
On social media sites, many supporters of Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies are vocal proponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank. Using tropes familiar to far-right extremists in the US, Israel and India, some Hindu nationalists on social media have been quick to call Suri, an Indian Muslim, a “terrorist”. Others have called on Trump to deport Suri to Gaza, not his home country.
America’s reputation as a free speech sanctuary may be battered, but in some corners of the world, it’s not yet broken. “We’re very concerned about Badar because if they deport him to India, the kind of hate messages on portals, YouTube comments et cetera, are very ugly. So, people here are wondering that if he comes back, will the security agencies interrogate him, will they harass him, what will be the implications?" Mithiborwala says. "We are just hoping and praying that he'll be given a fair trial in the US and be allowed to continue his work in peace.”
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