WASHINGTON

Lawyers for Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri on Monday urged a federal appeals court to block the Trump administration’s attempt to return him to immigration detention.

“The government’s argument essentially boils down to the sweeping assertion that it can use immigration laws to silence speech it disagrees with and no federal district court has authority to review the constitutionality of its actions,” Noor Zafar, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.

“My children need me, my wife needs me, my academic community and students need me, and my research requires my full focus,” Suri said in the statement released by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Center for Constitutional Rights. “I should not be punished for something I did not do, nor should I be made a tool for political gains.”

Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, was arrested in March outside his apartment complex in Arlington, Virginia.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked his visa after determining that he posed a “threat to US foreign policy.” He was transferred through five Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities before being held in Texas, far from his Palestinian-American wife and three US-citizen children.

Federal courts in Virginia previously ruled there was no legitimate basis to detain him, rejecting the government’s claim that foreign policy concerns or his associations justified confinement. Suri was released without bond in May.

Suri is challenging his detention under the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and federal administrative law.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration revoked the visas of thousands of international students, targeting many for participating in pro-Palestine campus protests or writing Op-Eds critical of Israel. Among them were Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University.