A beloved community leader, Salah Sarsour, was abducted by ICE on Monday, March 30th. Salah serves as the President of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee (ISM), board member of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and has been a community advocate for over three decades. He is a father, a grandfather, a dear husband, and a kind and principled role model for countless people in Milwaukee and beyond.
As an American Muslim community that believes in justice and equal rights for all people, we condemn this abduction and usurpation of our community leader’s rights. Salah has been a lawful permanent resident in the United States for over 32 years. He is a pillar of the community and a law-abiding Milwaukee business owner. Yet, he was pulled over while driving by over 10 ICE agents with no cause. He was taken out of state to a detention facility in Chicago before being transferred to a detention center in Indiana. His family was left scrambling to determine his whereabouts and his condition.
We must be clear that Salah is being targeted on the basis of his Palestinian and Muslim background. Salah grew up in the Occupied West Bank in Palestine, where he faced oppression and torture at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces as a child. After marriage, he moved to the United States and built a strong and loving family. Along the way, he has supported dozens of community members, hiring countless Milwaukeeans who needed a job, and building up advocacy and educational organizations to bring a greater voice to immigrants, Palestinians, and Muslims across Wisconsin and the country.
Salah’s story represents precisely the immigrant-refugee success story that should be celebrated, not demonized, as the cornerstone of this country’s professed values. Structural racism against Palestinians and Muslims, especially immigrants, weakens our democracy and erodes human rights for all. DHS targeting a community leader like Salah must raise alarms for all of us. His detention reflects a troubling trend we’ve seen with Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, Mohsen Mahdawi, and other voices critical of Israeli oppression: this administration is weaponizing the U.S. justice system to advance the interests of a foreign state, Israel, at a time when it is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Recognizing that it has lost American public opinion, the Israeli lobby is now leveraging the justice system to undermine our constitutional rights and suppress dissent. Salah’s arrest also reflects deeper threats to our democracy from an administration that disregards American values and treats constitutional and legal limits as optional. We stand against this coordinated attempt to wield U.S. immigration courts to silence Palestinian voices and advance a racist anti-Muslim agenda.
We write to affirm that we will fight for him. We will fight for his release just as we have fought as a community against all attacks on immigrant, Black, Palestinian, Somali, Latino, and Muslim civil and human rights. We understand what it feels like to be othered, racialized, and exceptionalized as victims of state violence, and we refuse to let go of our rights and our values. We invite you to stand with us and stand with Salah Sarsour.
his injustice has become too common across this country. The baseless allegations leveled against Salah are nothing more than a smokescreen to justify his detention and silence his advocacy. However, we know this fight for Salah is part of a larger trend: leveraging attacks on immigrants and on Palestinians, particularly, to build new precedents that whittle away at democratic norms and legal protections for everyone. That is why this fight is a fight for all of us. #FreeSalahSarsour.
With hope,
USCMO - US Council of Muslim OrganizationsAMP - American Muslims for Palestine
ISM - The Islamic Society of Milwaukee
MLFA - Muslim Legal Fund of America
CAIR - Council on American-Islamic Relations
MAS - Muslim American Society
Islamophobia Studies Center
Palestine Center for Public Policy
Islamophobia Studies Journal
Northern California Islamic Council
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