Rep. Don Beyer issued a video statement today after attending a hearing at the Eastern District of Virginia courthouse on the case of his constituent, Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University who lives in Arlington, Virginia, and who was in the country legally when he was detained without charges on orders from the Trump Administration in March. Beyer met with counsel for Dr. Suri yesterday in his Washington, D.C. office. A transcript of Beyer’s statement follows below. 

Dr. Suri was detained in March by masked agents outside his home in Rosslyn, and moved to a series of prisons and detention centers, ultimately ending in Texas. He is still being held there today, over 1,300 miles away from his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and three young children. According to Dr. Suri’s counsel, “His son spent days crying uncontrollably following his father’s disappearance, and has now stopped speaking.” Dr. Suri has never been charged with a crime and the government has never produced evidence that he did anything wrong.

In today’s hearing, Dr. Suri’s attorneys sought his return to Virginia, with Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles seeking further information from the government on their justification for moving him to Texas. The government claimed Dr. Suri was removed to Texas to prevent overcrowding at a Virginia detention center, yet, as Judge Giles pointed out, Suri had a room with a bed to himself in Virginia whereas, for the first 10 days of his detention in Texas Suri “was forced to sleep on the floor of the television room with the TV blaring nonstop and the lights on 24/7.”

Judge Giles gave the government 24 hours to answer questions about the transfer, with a further 24 hours for response from Dr. Suri’s legal team, and a ruling to follow next week. 

Transcript of Rep. Beyer’s video statement:

“This is Congressman Don Beyer, representing Northern Virginia in the U.S. House, and it’s Thursday afternoon, May 1st. I’m here in front of the U.S. courthouse in Alexandria.

“I just spent two hours listening to, Judge Patricia Giles, and the arguments over Dr. [Badar] Khan Suri. 

“He’s my constituent here legally in America. He’s a postdoc graduate student and teacher at Georgetown University working on conflict resolution. 

“He was picked up, a little less than two months ago, late at night by three plain-clothes ICE agents [with] no identification, put in an unmarked car and whisked off to Chantilly, to Farmville, to Chesterfield and then Richmond, to Louisiana, and finally to Texas. 

“We’re here today because his lawyers are making the case that he should never have been taken from Virginia when a writ of habeas corpus had been filed. 

“I’m very upset by this. Dr. [Suri] – no one has accused him of doing anything wrong. More than anything else, this is a great example – another sad example of the Trump administration’s attempt to instill fear and repression into our college campuses and to immigrants, or people with voices they don’t like, across this country. 

“We have to fight back. We have to resist. I’ll be doing everything I can to help Dr. [Suri] and his family, and I encourage each one of us to do all that we can to tell these stories, to help educate the American people about what’s happening, and this threat to our Constitution, to our rights. 

“It is Kafkaesque when somebody can be kidnapped without reason, without acknowledgment, without logic, without charges, and taken off to be locked in a prison in Texas, not knowing what happens next.”