The president of Wisconsin's largest mosque just got out of federal immigration custody after more than 80 days, having lost over 30 pounds, been denied diabetes care, and been told he couldn't pray with other Muslims on Eid. His crime, according to the Secretary of State of the United States, was making America look bad on antisemitism. Marco Rubio signed that memo himself.
Who Is Salah Sarsour, and Why Did the Feds Want Him Gone
Salah Sarsour is 53 years old. He has lived in Milwaukee since 1993. He owns several businesses, has six children who are US citizens, and nine grandchildren, with a tenth on the way. He is a permanent legal resident and the president of the largest mosque in Wisconsin. He has no criminal record in the United States.
According to The Guardian, on March 30, Sarsour was on his way to visit his elderly mother when at least 10 unmarked vehicles surrounded him. Armed agents in civilian clothing grabbed him and took him first to a detention center near Chicago, then to a facility in Indiana, miles further away. He initially thought they had the wrong guy.
They did not have the wrong guy. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed Sarsour was "suspected of funding terror organizations and lying on immigration forms." He has denied both accusations. What is not in dispute is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally signed a memo last year declaring Sarsour deportable, on the grounds that "his actions undermine US foreign policy to combat antisemitism around the world." That is the actual stated reason. That is a real government document that a real Cabinet official signed with his real name.
The Charges That Aren't Quite What They Sound Like
The DHS, when it arrested Sarsour, pointed to criminal convictions in Israel for throwing a Molotov cocktail and illegally attempting to possess weapons and ammunition. Sounds serious, right? Here is the context the government buried.
Sarsour says those charges stem from an arrest in 1989, when he was a teenager, during the first intifada. He was 16 years old. He says he was tortured, threatened with rape, and forced to sign documents written in Hebrew that he did not understand. He spent two years in an Israeli military prison. He was detained again by Israeli authorities in 1995 for nearly three months when he returned to visit.
The Guardian reports that US government documents filed in court show the government evaluated those Israeli arrests multiple times starting in 2000, while assessing his eligibility for naturalization. They knew. They reviewed it. They let him stay. For decades. Then, in the middle of a crackdown on Palestinian activism, they decided those 35-year-old charges were suddenly disqualifying. Funny how the timing works.
80 Days of What Sarsour Describes as Deliberate Degradation
Sarsour is diabetic. According to The Guardian, he was denied the daily blood sugar checks he required. The food was, in his words, something where "you don't know what you're eating sometimes." He slept on a two-inch mattress under a thin blanket in a freezing room shared with dozens of other men. He lost more than 30 pounds.
When he asked to gather with other Muslim detainees for Friday prayers, he was refused. When he asked to observe Eid, he was refused. He told The Guardian that the experience reminded him of his time in Israeli military prisons nearly four decades ago. "The humiliation, the treatment by guards, the way they talk to people, the way they try to put people down," he said.
A federal judge ultimately ordered his release after finding it was probable that Sarsour had been detained in retaliation for his advocacy for Palestinian rights, a finding the judge said would make the detention unlawful. The Trump administration is still trying to deport him. His next hearing is in Chicago this week.
The Bigger Pattern the Government Hopes You Won't Notice
Sarsour's case does not exist in isolation. Samuel Cole, a former immigration judge and senior ACLU attorney representing Sarsour, told The Guardian the case echoes those of Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and others detained over pro-Palestinian political activity. What makes Sarsour's situation stand out is that he has been a legal permanent resident for nearly 30 years, and the government has known about his record the entire time.
Cole put it plainly: "They use the immigration court as a tool for their immigration enforcement policies." What that means in practice is that the immigration system, which already has enormous power over non-citizens, is being deliberately weaponized against people who say things the administration dislikes. Sarsour is also a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, a national advocacy group that Trump officials have accused of working against US foreign policy interests.
Sarsour himself is not subtle about what he thinks this was. "They thought that by arresting me they would scare people fighting for justice for Palestinians," he told The Guardian, "but it's the opposite." A month after his release, he says he is not the same person he was before. He is also, by his own account, not going anywhere.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what happened here. The United States government grabbed a grandfather of nine off the street using a fleet of unmarked vehicles, locked him up for 80 days, denied him medical care for a chronic illness, refused to let him pray on one of the holiest days of the Islamic calendar, and kept him thousands of miles from his family. The legal justification was a memo personally signed by the Secretary of State citing political speech that the administration didn't like. The supporting evidence was a teenage arrest in an Israeli military prison from 1989. The government had known about that arrest for at least 25 years and never had a problem with it until now.
This is not a story about immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement is about people who are actually dangerous or have actually broken actual laws. This is a story about a government using the machinery of immigration law as a cudgel against political speech it finds inconvenient. A federal judge said so out loud. The ACLU said so. Sarsour said so. The administration did not meaningfully argue otherwise. They just kept trying to deport him anyway.
Marco Rubio signed that memo. Remember that the next time someone tries to tell you this administration is just enforcing the law. They are enforcing a political agenda, and they are using the bodies of legal permanent residents to send a message. The message is: shut up about Gaza or we will make your life unrecognizable. Sarsour's response, after 30 lost pounds and 80 lost days, was to say he would continue fighting. That is either the bravest thing you will read today or the saddest indictment of what this government has become. Probably both.
