Salah Sarsour has lost thirty pounds in sixty days. He has Type 2 diabetes. He is a legal permanent resident of the United States, the president of the largest mosque in Wisconsin, and he has no criminal record in this country. Federal agents are starving him inside a county jail in Clay County, Indiana, where the immigration apparatus deposited him in April. The arithmetic of the carceral state is unforgiving on this point: leave diabetes untreated, and the outcome is organ failure, or the outcome is death. Sarsour has lived in this country for more than three decades. The government’s stated justification for his detention is that he is a foreign-policy threat — a claim his attorneys call baseless, rooted in his criticism of the Israeli government and a military-court conviction handed down when he was a child living under occupation, an adjudication no American court would recognize as criminal. Two months in, the state is not arguing; it is simply withholding insulin.
Let me translate what the government is doing. Salah Sarsour is a Palestinian Muslim community leader who criticized a foreign government that the American foreign-policy establishment protects. The government took his legal residency, locked him in a jail, and is now, through deliberate medical neglect, killing him by inches. If this sounds like an accusation, it is. I intend to make it, and I intend to back it with the receipts.
The death is the point. A detention apparatus that can hold a lawful permanent resident of thirty years on a “foreign policy threat” designation, without having to produce the evidence in a timely adversarial hearing, needs the threat of death to work. Sarsour’s weight loss is the administrative equivalent of the cop’s knee on the neck — a demonstration that the state, having taken him, can do what it wants with his body, and that no one will stop it in time. A system that lacks the legal basis to hold someone indefinitely needs the practical consequence of holding him to be so terrifying that he takes a deal, or that his family capitulates, or that he simply dies and closes the case. The death is not an accident.
The pattern is the policy. The custodial system has, as a matter of institutional protocol, outsourced the monitoring of a life-threatening chronic condition to jailers who are not trained to manage diabetes and do not answer to a medical chain of command. The Bureau of Prisons and ICE detention facilities have a multi-decade record of denying insulin, substituting cheaper but less effective medications, failing to monitor blood sugar, and delaying specialist consults — until the detainee dies. The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Office of the Inspector General, and multiple federal courts have all documented this pattern in language that is increasingly desperate. The government responds by paying out settlements and hiring more jailers. The pattern is the policy. The pattern is that the man with the wrong passport, the wrong speech, the wrong skin gets sicker while the clock runs, and if he dies, the file closes and the incident report cites an underlying condition.
The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine writers’ room spent seven years working through the politics of occupation and the moral compromises of long conflict. In the early episode “Duet,” a Cardassian filing clerk named Aamin Marritza, who heard the screams of Bajoran prisoners every night and lived with the shame of his inaction, later attempts to force his own prosecution by masquerading as the camp commandant — not to escape punishment but to make Cardassia’s crimes legally visible. Kira, the former resistance fighter, refuses to grant him the clean martyrdom he seeks, because Marritza’s guilt is not the same as the commandant’s. Before he can be released, a Bajoran extremist stabs him to death on the Promenade with the line, “He’s a Cardassian. That’s reason enough.” Kira’s reply — “No. No, it’s not” — is the franchise’s most profound statement about the difference between collective punishment and accountability.
The American immigration-detention apparatus is operating on the Bajoran extremist’s logic right now. The mere fact that Sarsour is Palestinian, that he spoke against Israel, that he was convicted by a military court as a minor under occupation — that is “reason enough.” He is the Cardassian cipher onto which the state’s entire apparatus of threat-detection and removal can be projected. And because the cipher is not a person with a pancreas, the apparatus does not check his blood sugar. The cipher’s weight loss is the cipher’s problem. The cipher’s family is the cipher’s collateral. The system is counting on the rest of us to look at the cipher and see a threat, not a diabetic.
A year before his death, during the Memphis sanitation strike, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that the workers’ dignity was inseparable from their bodily safety — that you cannot tell a man he has a right to a job while rendering the job’s conditions lethal to his body. The same logic applies to detention. You cannot tell a man he has a right to due process while the custody you hold him in erodes his body until the process becomes irrelevant. The man is the body. The state is the proximate cause of the body’s decline. The state knows. The state continues. The system that kills by omission is a system that has chosen killing.
The administration, since April, has been deflecting calls for Sarsour’s release — calls that began with religious leaders and community members demanding his freedom. The deflection takes the form every administrative detention regime in history has used: the detainee is accused of something too sensitive to disclose; the threat is too grave to allow bail; the process, we are told, is working, just wait. The entire performance is the bad-faith technique catalog’s textbook “pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal,” staged in reverse: ICE withdraws legitimacy from the person — “you are a threat, therefore your medical claims cannot be taken at face value, therefore your lawyers’ statements are propaganda, therefore the judge should deny relief” — and then points to the administrative process it has delegated to medically untrained officers as the neutral ground that must be respected. It is a shell game. The floor of the shell is Sarsour’s pancreas.
ICE’s legal argument, as I understand it from the public record, is that Sarsour is a national-security risk whose specific threat cannot be disclosed. The argument is not new. It shifts the burden: the detainee must prove he is not a threat, in some proceeding where the evidence he needs is classified, under conditions where his health is deteriorating, while his lawyers file motions that the government answers with delay. The argument is structurally identical to the one the FBI used against Muslims after September 11, the one the British government used against Irish republicans, the one the Israeli military courts used against Palestinian minors like the one Sarsour was when he was first convicted. Sarsour’s life has been lived inside that argument’s shadow: first as a Palestinian child tried under occupation, now as an American permanent resident disappeared on a secret designation. The argument has followed him across decades and across oceans, because the argument is not about him. It is about the power to disappear people, and the need for an administrative language that makes the disappearance seem necessary. Sarsour’s body is the only evidence against the argument. The state is destroying that evidence day by day. This is not a metaphor; this is what organ failure from untreated diabetes looks like.
I will not perform empathy on the page. I will state what is known: the American Diabetes Association’s Standards of Care in Diabetes specifies that people with Type 2 diabetes on insulin need blood glucose monitoring at least once daily, that insulin must be administered on a schedule coordinated with meals, that hypoglycemia must be treated emergently, and that missing doses can lead to diabetic ketoacidosis, coma, and death within days. A jail that is not doing those things — and Sarsour’s attorneys say this jail is not — is running a clinical experiment on a detainee, without consent, with a known lethal endpoint. The experiment is not funded by a university IRB. The experiment is funded by the county’s detention contract. The research question is: how long can a man with diabetes live without consistent medical care before he takes the deal, or his family stops calling, or he dies and the cost of defending the civil suit is less than the cost of providing him care? That is the actual research question the carceral state runs every day on thousands of detainees, and every death is a data point. Salah Sarsour is a data point that is still alive.
The root cause of Sarsour’s condition is not a rogue warden in an Indiana jail. The root cause is the structural merger of immigration enforcement with the domestic carceral project. It is the decision, made incrementally over decades, that human beings without political power inside the detention system are acceptable casualties of policy. When a legal resident can be treated as a foreign prisoner because of what he said, the green card is revealed for what it currently is: a revocable license, contingent on political compliance. Malcolm X, in the final year of his life, argued that you cannot hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. The tree here is the carceral immigration apparatus. The roots are the legislative and executive choices that authorize the withholding of humane care as a tactic of extraction. To ask for better medical protocols in the county jail without demanding the dismantling of the legal rationale that put Sarsour in the cell in the first place is to water the leaves while ignoring the roots. We must name the tree. We must name the people who planted it. We must name the mechanism by which it produces this specific, preventable harm.
The Star Wars prequel trilogy mapped the legalistic hollowing-out of a republic with an accuracy that remains painful to watch. The mechanism is always the same. You do not suspend the rule of law all at once; you stretch the definitions until they snap. You declare a “policy threat.” You invoke a “foreign” conviction. You use the language of the law to perform an act that is entirely pre-legal. Padmé Amidala’s line about how liberty dies with thunderous applause is routinely quoted, but it is the preceding scenes that matter — the committee hearings, the procedural maneuvers, the legal technicalities deployed by men in fine suits to strip rights from a targeted minority. The apparatus does not need a dictator to bypass your rights. It only needs a mid-level bureaucrat willing to check the box that says “medical review deferred.”
Karis Nemik, writing his manifesto in the occupied territories of Star Wars fiction, captured the exact structural dynamic at play: “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.” The parallel is exact. Power doesn’t panic, but it does escalate when it senses its legitimacy slipping. The escalation is the thirty-pound weight loss of a man who should be walking out of his mosque to lead prayers. The escalation is the medical neglect. It is not strength. It is the frantic flailing of a state that knows it has lost the moral argument, so it reaches for the physical one.
And that brings us to the demand King himself made in his Birmingham jail cell: that we refuse a “negative peace which is the absence of tension” when the situation demands a “positive peace which is the presence of justice.” The demand here is not for the apparatus to show a little more bureaucratic mercy. That is the negative peace. The edifice is the legal architecture that permits the executive branch to detain a lawful permanent resident on “foreign policy” grounds, a category so elastic it has become a catch-all for silencing dissent. The edifice is the county-jail contract that outsources immigration detention to local sheriffs who lack medical infrastructure and accountability. The edifice is the judicial rubber stamp that says “national security” and closes the file. Dismantling that edifice is the only form of compassion Sarsour can actually receive.
The Beloved Community is not a place where this apparatus is reformed. The Beloved Community is the horizon under which the work of dismantling it is done. That work, right now, is to demand that the federal judge who has heard the motion order his release, that the Department of Justice open a civil-rights investigation, that the medical contractor be stripped of its contract, and that the county jail be held liable for the deliberate indifference that has already occurred. And the work is to refuse the resignation that says “the process is working” while the process is killing a man. The late King’s eschatological edge was not optimism; it was the insistence that the arc bends only if specific people, in a specific moment, push it. This is the push. The call you can make, the donation you can make, the protest you can join, the pressure you can put on the elected officials who fund ICE and contract with counties and sign the detention orders — those are instruments too. The state is betting that we will not use them. The state has bet wrong before. It is betting wrong now.
By any means necessary. The phrase is a commitment to structural change — to the use of every political, legal, and moral instrument that can stop the apparatus from killing a man. The column I have written here is one instrument. The naming is the indictment. The arc is heavy. It takes many hands to move it. But the hands are here, and the work is clear.