<div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-0"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The Trump administration has agreed to allow Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University whom officials had accused of promoting Hamas and tried to deport, to return to his work at the school and reinstate his legal status as part of a <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.570359/gov.uscourts.vaed.570359.107.0.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">settlement</a> filed in federal court on Tuesday.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The agreement cleared the way, for now, for Mr. Suri to return to his job and life at the university, where he has also taught undergraduates, even as his case challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to remove him from the country moves forward.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Most immediately, the settlement headed off a hearing scheduled for Friday in which Mr. Suri’s lawyers were set to argue that the Trump administration should reinstate records of his legal status in a Department of Homeland Security database and cease efforts to deport him. Officials had terminated those records in March, claiming without evidence that he had worked to spread “Hamas propaganda” on Georgetown’s campus.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Suri, an Indian national, had previously faced detention in an immigration facility in Texas as one of a handful of prominent students and academics the Trump administration detained in a wave of arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in March. The arrests and threatened deportations of legal immigrants on campuses have set off a series of court clashes, with judges freeing many of those targeted, and raised fears that the Trump administration is chilling free speech.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-1"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-1"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Like several others, including <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-interview-trump.html" title="">Mahmoud Khalil</a>, <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/us/tufts-rumeysa-ozturk-release.html" title="">Rumeysa Ozturk</a> and <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/nyregion/columbia-student-mohsen-mahdawi-freed.html" title="">Mohsen Mahdawi</a>, Mr. Suri was abruptly arrested by masked immigration agents and shuttled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement through a number of facilities in Virginia and Louisiana in what his lawyers have said in court was an attempt to prevent them from immediately locating him.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Unlike some who took on more visible roles in campus demonstrations, Mr. Suri appears to have been arrested based on a vague combination of social media posts and his association with his wife, a U.S. citizen whose father, Ahmed Yousef, formerly served as a senior political adviser to the Hamas leadership in Gaza.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Suri was never charged with a crime and said in a statement after his arrest that he had “never even been to a protest.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In May, a federal judge <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/georgetown-academic-immigration-detention.html#:~:text=Suri's%20arrest%20in%20March%2C%20another,have%20been%20critical%20of%20Israel." title="">ordered Mr. Suri released</a> from detention in Texas, and a federal appeals court allowed him to remain free while he continued litigation fighting for his ability to remain in the country on constitutional grounds.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">By terminating Mr. Suri’s records, the government also jeopardized the legal status of his two children, whose student status remains tied to Mr. Suri’s.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-3"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-2"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">As part of the deal on Tuesday, the government agreed not to terminate his children’s records and to provide at least 21 days’ notice before acting again based on “newly discovered, independent legal grounds” for canceling those records in a database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">While Mr. Suri and his contemporaries at other schools who faced arrests on similar grounds have notched a string of legal wins, the more overarching fight over the Trump administration’s student deportation policy is only just now reaching a crescendo.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The question of whether the Trump administration abused its power in seeking to deport a number of like-minded student demonstrators over their criticism of the Israeli government was the focus of a <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/us/politics/trump-student-arrests-immigration-trial.html" title="">two-week trial</a> before Judge William G. Young in Boston in July.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Lawyers in that case had argued that the administration set a policy of pursuing “ideological deportations” against those students in violation of their freedom of speech and association. The groups suing also <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/xicmg5tgiw" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">filed a post-trial brief</a> summarizing that argument on Tuesday evening.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">But Judge Young expressed some skepticism throughout the trial that the Trump administration had misused the <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/trump-deportations-students-campus-protests.html" title="">narrow but real power</a> afforded to the secretary of state to cancel noncitizens’ visas or even to designate green card holders deportable. He is expected to rule in the coming days.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In the individual student cases, judges have generally found so far that the First Amendment probably protects the speech or conduct that was the basis for the government’s arrests of students like Mr. Suri originally.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div>