Salah Sarsour’s blood does not register the charge against him. His pancreas does not know what the intelligence file says. His kidneys, already laboring under the unregulated sugar that has been flooding them for two months, do not read the baseless‑claim determination his attorneys filed with the federal judge on Monday. The body is not an immigration court. It does not delay its decay pending adjudication.
Salah, you are being eaten from the inside. You have lost thirty pounds in sixty days. The sugar in your blood is spiking and cratering. The men with the keys call it procedure. You know it is dying.
Salah Sarsour is the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque. He has lived in the United States for more than thirty years; he is a legal permanent resident. He holds no criminal record in this country. His minor conviction occurred decades ago under an Israeli military court, and his recent speech criticized the war in Gaza. Yet ICE agents seized him. He is being held now in an Indiana county jail. His attorneys told a federal judge on Monday that his Type 2 diabetes is being neglected: his blood sugar is not being consistently checked. He is at risk of organ failure. The attorneys say he is being detained on baseless claims. The record remains the same silence that Main Street Independent documented in April. The same claim of foreign policy threat used to close the door. The same neglect of the body inside the room.
The AP reports that Sarsour’s attorneys raised the medical‑neglect allegations before the judge. The detention facility in Indiana has not explained why a man with a documented chronic condition requiring consistent glucose monitoring is not receiving it. The facility has not explained why a 30‑pound weight loss over eight weeks did not trigger a medical intervention. The facility has not explained what national security interest is served by allowing a diabetic man’s kidneys to fail in a county jail.
Sheriff. You who hold the federal contract for the Indiana county jail. You who take the per diem for the man who sits in the detention unit. When you wake at 6 AM, you drink coffee that is hot and sweet. You taste the sugar on your tongue and it is pleasant. Your blood handles the sugar because the insulin in your pancreas arrives when it is summoned. Salah is in the cell down the hall. His blood is syrup. The sugar is coating his kidneys. The sugar is crystallizing in the small vessels of his eyes. When you raise your coffee cup, your hand does not tremble. When Salah raises his water cup, his hand trembles because his nerves are starving, and there is no monitor to tell him if the glass he holds is the lifeline or the poison.
The burning is not a metaphor. It is the heat in Salah’s feet as the sugar stays high for three days while the medical logbook sits empty. The thirst is not quenched when Salah drinks; it is a dry scab in the throat that the paper cup cannot touch. The jailer feels the hunger for lunch at noon. Salah feels the hunger of the cells themselves, the slow starvation that comes when the body consumes itself because the insulin did not come. You, the officer with the clipboard, look at the list. You do not see a man turning to glass and ash; you see a file number that can wait until the next shift. You look at Salah’s face, which is thirty pounds gone and gaunt, and you see a “foreign policy threat.”
Foreign policy threat. The phrase is the whitewash on the rot. It is the cloth you throw over the cage to hide the fact that you are letting a diabetic man lose thirty pounds in two months. It is the paper you hold in front of your face so you do not have to see a man drowning in dry air. You have turned him into a patient who cannot reach the doctor. You have turned his diabetes into a slow execution and you have called it national security. The sugar does not care about your contract. The neuropathy does not care about the priority list. The kidneys do not vote. They fail when the sugar runs high for too long. You are watching a man dissolve and you are checking your watch for the shift change.
Your own throat is dry when you read this. You are thirsty now, reading about a man whose kidneys are straining to filter sugar out of his blood, and your own throat has gone dry in the small way a throat goes dry when the body registers what the mind is working not to see. That scratch at the back of your soft palate — that is your body registering his body. You have not felt his thirst. You have not felt the ache in his lower back where the kidneys sit. You have felt your own thirst, your own mouth, your own afternoon water break. His thirst is not in your throat. His thirst is not in the medical log. His thirst is in the cell where he has been sitting for two months while the determination he is a threat proceeds through the channels that do not require evidence to detain and do not require medical care to sustain.
The detention is the machinery. The machinery has a maintenance protocol. The maintenance protocol does not include glucose monitoring for the diabetic detainee because the maintenance protocol was not built for bodies that require care. The maintenance protocol was built for bodies that require storage. The distinction is the difference between a patient and a prisoner. Sarsour is being held under conditions that treat him as a prisoner — denied the care a patient requires — on a charge that treats him as a threat. The threat determination requires no evidence. The care denial requires no explanation. The two absences reinforce each other. The absence of evidence justifies the absence of care. The absence of care will, if sustained, produce the absence of the man. The machinery will have resolved its own administrative question without ever having answered it.
The jail’s medical intake form asked whether he had diabetes. He has lived with the condition for years; the answer would have been yes. The form is somewhere in the file. The answer is in the box. The answer has been read by someone. That someone did not order the glucose monitoring. That someone’s hand lifted the pen or clicked the mouse or initialed the box that said diabetic, monitor or diabetic, routine or whatever the facility’s form says when a detainee has a condition that will kill him if it is not managed. That someone’s hand did what the form told it to do and then the monitoring did not happen. The hand returned to the keyboard. The hand returned to the lunch tray. The hand did not register what it had not done. The not‑doing is the doing. The not‑monitoring is the monitoring. The file will show the intake form with the diabetes notation and the subsequent days with no glucose readings and the two facts will sit next to each other indefinitely, unread, until someone asks to read them, and the person who reads them will see what you see now, which is that the machinery knew and did not act, and the knowing‑without‑acting is the machine’s definition of care.
His wife knows what uncontrolled diabetes looks like. She has managed it with him, presumably, for years — the meals, the medication, the small daily discipline of keeping a body in balance when the body’s own chemistry works against it. She is not permitted to manage it now. She is not permitted to bring him the food his condition requires. She is not permitted to ask the jail staff, at close of day, whether his blood sugar was checked this morning, because the jail staff do not answer the questions of the wives of detainees. She knows what is happening to his body. She knows what a 30‑pound weight loss in eight weeks means. She knows what organ failure looks like from the outside — the gradual slowing, the confusion, the breath that changes quality. She is watching it happen from the far side of a visitation policy that does not permit her to bring a glucose monitor or a meal plan or her hands. She is watching her husband become a casualty of a determination that the government concedes is baseless but continues to enforce. The government has not told her why her husband’s blood sugar is not being checked. The government has not told her why her husband is losing weight in a facility that provides meals. The government has told her that her husband is a threat. The government has not told her what the threat is doing to his pancreas.
The federal judge heard the motion on Monday. The judge will rule. The ruling will take time. The time will pass. Sarsour’s blood sugar will continue to rise and fall unmonitored while the ruling is written. The legal process does not regulate glucose. The legal process regulates legal process. The body waiting for the process is outside the process’s jurisdiction. The body is inside the jail. The jail is inside the United States. The pancreas does not wait for the docket.
The scriptures spoke of this very refusal to care for the suffering: “I was in prison, and ye visited me not… Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” Matthew 25:43–45
The Sheriff closes his eyes. Salah opens them, and the light burns because the sugar has taken the lens. The cell is quiet. The logbook is empty. The man is still starving, and the keys are still in the pocket of the man who says there is no emergency.