This is one of the most poignant interviews I’ve ever done. I hope you watch it and learn about what Mapheze Saleh and her family are going through.
On March 17, the Trump administration kidnapped Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, as he was on his way home.
In just four days, he was transferred between five different facilities across three states, where he was refused food or water to break his fast. Dr. Khan Suri has been forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded cells surrounded by blaring television, and lights on for hours on end, with his family left reeling in his absence.
On Monday, at Zeteo’s anniversary event in Washington DC, his wife, Mapheze Saleh, joined me in front of an audience to tell us about who Badar Khan Suri is as a person, the conditions he has faced in ICE detention, and how deeply this has affected her family.
Saleh’s first extended interview in English media comes right before a pivotal Wednesday hearing, when a federal court will hear motions to compel his return to Virginia, and for him to be released on bond.
“I want you to imagine with me, imagine that you are on your way back to home, you will find a masked federal agent waiting for you to come home and then they're going to arrest you and then transfer you from a detention facility to another. And it ends up with you 1,500 miles from your family,” Saleh told me. “Imagine that your day and night are the same because they will never switch off the lights in the detention center... And when it comes to security check, they will call him by his number, not by his name. They will ask him for his number which they assigned to him. So, you imagine all of that and you will come to know what Badar is going through.”
In her husband’s absence, Saleh tried to help their young children navigate the unnavigable question of where their father is and why he is not with them.
“…my younger twins who are five years old, they keep asking about their father. ‘Where is our father? Why he's not coming? Where has he been for a long time? We want him. We want to hug him. We are missing him so much.’ And my answer will be that ‘he will come back soon to you.’ I tried to delay telling the truth to my elder son until he overheard the conversation between me and the lawyers. And that moment was so touching, that he came quietly and he came to hug me and then told me that ‘inshallah my father will come soon.’”
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