• Arfat Sheikh’s friends say he was travelling to Washington to attend an ‘Art as Resistance’ panel
• Saffron Kingdom director has a pending asylum application
WASHINGTON: A Kashmiri filmmaker detained upon his arrival in the US has asked a federal court to intervene, according to a habeas corpus petition filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, on the same day his supporters say he was taken into custody.
The petitioner, 42-year-old Arfat Sheikh, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on Sept. 24, shortly after stepping off a flight at Dulles International Airport, friends and supporters say.
They told reporters that Sheikh was travelling to Washington to attend an ‘Art as Resistance’ panel at Busboys and Poets, a Washington restaurant and cultural centre known for hosting literary, political and arts events, when ICE agents surrounded him and took him into custody.
The case was initially filed in the Alexandria Division and transferred the following day to the Richmond Division, where it was assigned to US District Judge David J. Novak.
Sheikh is being held at the Caroline Detention Facility in Bowling Green, Virginia, according to his supporters. The court record does not identify ICE as the agency that arrested him, and the federal docket does not yet disclose the government’s substantive response to his habeas petition.
According to a campaign seeking Sheikh’s release, he entered the United States legally on a student visa to pursue graduate studies in film at Georgia State University. The campaign says he later sought asylum in 2020 and has a pending immigration application, along with authorisation to live and work in the United States.
These details have not been publicly confirmed by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security.
Sheikh, who lives in Alexandria, is the director of Saffron Kingdom, a feature film about displacement, identity and conflict in India-held Kashmir. The film has been shown at theaters, universities and cultural institutions in the United States and abroad.
It has received awards at several independent film festivals, and Sheikh was named an Emerging Filmmaker Activist at the Teaneck International Film Festival in 2025.
His detention comes as the Trump administration has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement across the United States, bringing renewed scrutiny to the use of detention against people whose immigration cases are still pending.
Sheikh’s detention follows a series of high-profile immigration cases involving foreign-born students, activists and community leaders.
Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist, was detained by ICE in March 2025 and spent 104 days in immigration custody. A federal judge ordered his release in June 2025, although his immigration proceedings continued.
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested by immigration agents in March 2025 and held in Louisiana for more than six weeks. A federal judge ordered her release, finding that she had raised substantial constitutional claims and did not present a danger or flight risk.
This month, an immigration judge ruled that Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian American and president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, could be deported under a national-security and foreign-policy provision of immigration law. Sarsour, who has lived in the United States since 1993 and has no domestic criminal record, was detained by ICE earlier this year. His lawyers plan to appeal the ruling.
For Sheikh, the immediate question is not simply whether he can remain in the United States permanently. His federal habeas petition raises the more immediate question of whether his detention is lawful.
Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2026
