The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a new legal complaint challenging the federal government’s continued exclusion of a prominent Swiss scholar, Tariq Ramadan, from the United States. The complaint also challenges a provision of the USA Patriot Act that, the ACLU says, authorizes the government to deny visas to foreign citizens on the basis of their political views.

The new complaint adds to a lawsuit filed in 2006 by the ACLU, which said that the government was preventing professors and others from meeting with Mr. Ramadan and from hearing constitutionally protected speech. Mr. Ramadan, a leading European expert on contemporary Islam who was profiled in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, had also been set to take up a teaching post at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, when his entry into the United States was barred. At the time, federal authorities invoked the Patriot Act’s “ideological exclusion” provision, which applies to those who have “endorsed or espoused” terrorism, although when challenged in court, the authorities never presented evidence backing up the accusations.

Last June a federal judge ordered the government to either grant Mr. Ramadan a visa or explain why it would not do so. The court also ruled that the government could not bar non-citizens from the United States simply because of their political views. In September the State Department offered a new justification for excluding Mr. Ramadan: that he had donated about 600 euros from 1998 to 2002 to legal French and Swiss groups that provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. In 2003 the Bush administration added the groups to a blacklist because they allegedly provided “material support” to Hamas.

In the amended complaint, which was filed late Friday, the ACLU argues that the donations were not a basis for inadmissibility at the time they were made and the current material-support provision cannot be applied retroactively.