The fourth circuit court, a United States Courts Of Appeals, rejected the Trump administration’s bid to redetain Badar Khan Suri and left in place the ruling that let the Georgetown University scholar remain free on bail. The 2-1 decision came on Thursday and also blocked the government’s effort to move the case from Virginia to Texas.
Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was arrested in March 2025 and spent nearly six weeks in a Texas detention center before a federal court ordered his release on bail. He is married to a US citizen.
Fourth circuit court ruling
The panel said it disagreed with the reading of the law used in the earlier government-favorable appeals court decisions in similar cases. Those judges had said district judges stepped in too soon, before the cases moved fully through the immigration court system. In Suri’s case, the panel rejected that view.
In its explanation, the panel said that “denying judicial review of detention claims like Suri’s misreads Congress’ statutes and undermines the protections guaranteed all persons on American soil by the writ of habeas corpus.” It also said, “If a noncitizen is challenging their detention pending removal, then waiting for their removal proceedings does them no good.”
Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi
The ruling follows two earlier appeals court decisions that went the other way. In January, a different decision favored the government in a similar appeal brought against Mahmoud Khalil, and earlier this week another appeals court ruled against Mohsen Mahdawi. The panel in Suri’s case answered those rulings directly with one word: “We disagree.”
Noor Zafar, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the federal government cannot do “an end run around the first amendment by locking people up for their speech and denying them their day in court.”
Badar Khan Suri
The ruling leaves Suri free while his immigration case continues and keeps the dispute in the federal-court track rather than allowing the government to restore custody through the appeal. A future supreme court review remains a possible next step after the split among appeals courts, but the Thursday ruling stands for now.
