DHS arrests Georgetown researcher who is married to the daughter of a Hamas official
Badar Khan Suri is the son-in-law of Ahmed Yousef, who criticized Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel
Georgetown University, Washington, DC. (Getty Images)
(JTA) — Federal officials have detained a Georgetown University researcher who they said was “spreading Hamas propaganda,” expanding the number of arrests under the Trump administration’s push to crack down on perceived antisemitism on college campuses.
Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who is a postdoctoral fellow, was arrested on Monday, according to a petition filed by his lawyers and first reported by Politico.
Suri has not been charged with a crime, nor was he named in news coverage about pro-Palestinian protests at Georgetown last year. But he has attracted attention because of his social media posts and because he is married to another Georgetown student, Mapheze Ahmad Yousef Saleh, who is the daughter of a senior Hamas official.
Saleh, a graduate student at the school’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, is a U.S. citizen. Her father, Ahmed Yousef, was an adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel assassinated. Yousef criticized Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “terrible error,” a rarity among associates of the terror group.
He was considered “deportable” under the same provision that the Department of Homeland Security cited when arresting Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University earlier this month, department officials said. That provision, rarely exercised, allows for non-citizens to be deported if their activities are deemed to be at odds with U.S. foreign interests, even if they have not committed a crime.
“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media. Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” tweeted Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant DHS secretary. “The Secretary of State issued a determination on March 15, 2025 that Suri’s activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable under INA section 237(a)(4)(C)(i).”
Suri is awaiting trial in Louisiana, where Khalil is being held — though this week a judge ordered the Trump administration to move Khalil to New Jersey, where he was when his lawyers filed a petition challenging his arrest.
Like Khalil, Suri has come under scrutiny from pro-Israel watchdogs. A February article about the couple and their ties to Hamas in the Jewish News Syndicate highlighted Suri’s social media posts in the immediate wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which he cast doubt about incidents of alleged violence. Canary Mission, an anonymous pro-Israel group that compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian activists, has maintained a file on Saleh.
According to a 2018 article in the Hindustan Times, Saleh and Suri met when Suri joined a humanitarian delegation to Gaza in 2011. The couple married in 2014 and had a son, named for the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, while living in India before coming to the United States.
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