On Monday, March 17, 2025, masked immigration agents arrested Georgetown postdoctoral fellow and teacher Badar Khan Suri outside his home in northern Virginia. Dr. Suri is being held without charges in a Louisiana detention facility by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for “spreading Hamas propaganda” and having “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. This follows the unlawful arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and green card holder on March 8, for being involved in pro-Palestine protests on campus.
The academic world, specifically from the Global South, of which we claim to be a part, is being assaulted by the empire. Khalil was the litmus test. Suri was the result. And it will not end there.
In a disappointing but profoundly telling contrast, in the same week, members of our student body erupted in a crusade against the Student Government Association for passing an allegedly undemocratic amendment to its constitution. I do not care to contribute to or engage with this mess of a debate. Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to hold up a mirror to our community; let me describe what you’ll see.
If this episode proves anything, it is that we are not as helpless and institutionally incapacitated as we claim to be when it comes to real world issues. A single technicality, no matter how unjust, had the power to galvanize the entire community in a matter of hours. If we have the energy to bicker over something so miniscule in relevance to our student body, let alone the outside world, then we can most certainly summon the energy, the public support, and the imagination to confront actual injustices. We are so removed from the real world it is laughable. That is not to say, of course, that the United States is the center of the “real world” and that events unfolding there must necessarily shock our conscience. Quite the contrary; it was inevitable that Washington’s role in creating and bankrolling tyranny and injustice abroad would eventually manifest domestically. Instead, we must care about Suri and Khalil because their detention represents a different face of the same fight we have been fighting for the last year and a half. And also (although this should not be a reason to care), because we are not immune here in Doha either.
Nowhere in the world is perfect. Certain forms of advocacy are acceptable in some places and punished in others. But on this particular issue of academics in the West being unlawfully arrested and detained, we are in a sweet spot. This can be a litmus test for how we respond.
We are not anti-empire revolutionaries by default, as many of us claim to be, just by virtue of being geographically far from the heart of the empire and because our community is demographically more representative of the Global South. What this positionality actually does is it bestows on you, now more than ever, a responsibility to use your voice, relative privilege, resources, and energies, to challenge the crackdown on academic freedom that we are witnessing around the world.
From South Africa and Bosnia to Bangladesh and Vietnam, students have always been at the heart of social justice movements. However, the vast majority of us have not known what it means to act in collective solidarity because we lack the initiative to come together for anything that actually matters.
You think you’re changing the world by fighting among yourselves, but your energy could not be more misplaced. You think you’re valiant advocates for human rights, but your education could not be more toothless.
If we are seen as an appendage of the main campus, it is because we think and act small. If we are to escape this image, we must act accordingly.
To start, email the presidentsoffice@georgetown.edu and demand that the administration fight for Dr. Suri’s release and the protection of all members of the international student and teaching community.
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