The Trump administration is trying to deport a Muslim community leader for his Palestine advocacy. The man’s name is Salah Sarsour. He is fifty-three years old, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a permanent resident of the United States for nearly three decades, the father of six American citizens and the grandfather of nine (with a tenth on the way), the owner of several businesses, and — until a federal judge ordered his release last month — a man who had spent more than eighty days in ICE detention for the crime of speaking his conscience.
He lost more than thirty pounds. He is diabetic, and was denied the daily blood-sugar checks he needed. He slept on a two-inch mattress in a freezing room with dozens of other men. He was told he could not gather with other Muslim men for Friday prayers. He was told he could not celebrate Eid. The Department of Homeland Security claims he was “suspected of funding terror organizations and lying on immigration forms.” He has denied both claims, and a federal judge has now found his detention was probably retaliation for his advocacy — a likelihood the judge said would render his detention unlawful. The administration is continuing to pursue his deportation. He is due in court in Chicago this week for the first substantive hearing in his immigration case, represented by the ACLU of Illinois, which has called it a particularly alarming echo of the detentions of Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia — another escalation in a pattern community leaders began naming months ago.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, personally signed a memo last year describing Sarsour as deportable because “his actions undermine US foreign policy to combat antisemitism around the world.” Read the sentence for what it is. The United States Secretary of State has signed a finding that a Palestinian man’s speech is incompatible with American foreign policy. Sarsour is a board member of American Muslims for Palestine. He has advocated for Palestinian human rights. He has no criminal record in the United States. The government reviewed his record at least four times since 2000 — in 2000, 2008, 2010, and 2019 — and did not act. The current administration’s position is that the First Amendment does not extend to a Palestinian voice — that a man who has lived here for thirty-three years and led a community and raised six American children can be put in a freezing cell on a two-inch mattress because Marco Rubio says his advocacy undermines the fight against antisemitism.
When Sarsour was a teenager, in 1989, during the first intifada, Israeli soldiers arrested him. He has said he was beaten and threatened with rape and forced to sign documents in Hebrew — a language he did not read. He spent two years in an Israeli prison on the strength of those documents. The United States government knew all of this. It reviewed his record at least four times over the past quarter-century and did not move to deport him. The current administration’s position is that the documents signed under torture in a prison cell in 1989 are now the basis for deportation in 2026. The man is a Muslim. The people he loves are the people the administration says he must not be heard defending. He is guilty of standing with them in their suffering. The administration calls that a deportable offense. I call it what the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an all call it: the work of a conscience.
The Torah commands it repeatedly, and the speaker is Moses in every verse: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34). The memory of having been the stranger is the precondition of welcoming the stranger. Sarsour was the stranger in Palestine before he came here. He came to build a family, he said, in a place where he could “live freely.” He is the stranger again.
There is a passage in Matthew’s Gospel in which a king separates the peoples of the earth the way a shepherd separates sheep from goats, and the only question he asks is what they did to the stranger in front of them — not what they thought about immigration, not what they said at the press conference, but whether they welcomed the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The verse does not say they were strangers and you sorted them. It says I was the stranger and you did not welcome me. The work of conscience is small and particular, and it is done to the person standing in front of you.
The Qur’an says it too, in the same key: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin. And whether the case concerns a rich or a poor person, Allah is more worthy of both. So do not let hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness” (Sura 4:135). The administration is asking American Muslims to weigh their conscience against the people they love, and asking them to choose the policy of the state over the people of their own blood, and calling that choice a fight against antisemitism. The Qur’an calls it by another name. Hatred of a people — of any people, including the Jewish people, whose persecution has been the longest and most terrible in the modern record — is not a license to abandon justice against another. The administration is demanding that American Muslims perform the abandonment. It is calling the demand a virtue. It is not. It is what the Qur’an forbids.
Pope Francis stood on the island of Lampedusa in 2013 and named the condition in which we now find ourselves: the globalization of indifference. “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business.” The condition of Salah Sarsour in that Indiana facility — the blood-sugar checks denied, the food he could not identify, the two-inch mattress in a freezing room, the more than eighty days — is the globalization of indifference working exactly as Francis described it. The system does not need to hate the man it is grinding. The diabetes care his attorneys say was denied is not a bug in the system. It is the system working as it is built. Indifference is enough. The system grinds him anyway.
The prophet Amos was not a subtle man, and the system he named was not subtle either. “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink!’” The cows of Bashan sat in their comfort and called it order. Amos did not write a column about their complexity. He named the oppression. The administration that holds a diabetic man in a freezing cell while a federal judge rules his detention was probably retaliation sits in comfortable offices and calls it the fight against antisemitism. It is not engaged in the fight against antisemitism. It is engaged in the fight against a Palestinian voice. The hooks that took the cows of Bashan away did not take them quickly, and the system that is doing for Sarsour what it did for the cows of Bashan is not undone quickly either. But it was undone. The cows of Bashan are not on the mountain of Samaria anymore.
I say this as a Catholic who has eaten at tables where both Christian and Muslim blessings were spoken, and as a Mexican-American who knows what it is to be the people the country has agreed not to see. The history of my own community in this country is a history of being deported for what we said and who we prayed to and who we loved; the Catholic Church has its own long record of complicity in the same machinery, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the cruelty being done to Salah Sarsour is not the inheritance of a single party. It is the inheritance of a country that has not yet decided whether the stranger is a person or a problem, and that has too often chosen the wrong answer. The door of return is open — to the agents who held the man on a two-inch mattress, to the officials who signed the memos, to the men who pushed the paperwork that denied a diabetic man his blood-sugar checks. You are not outside this. You are inside it. There is no footnote in the Gospel, and none in the Torah, and none in the Qur’an, that exempts the officer who was following orders. You are a person, and you have done a cruel thing, and the door is open if you will walk through it.
Sarsour has said he has nothing to hide, and that he will continue with the message whether he is inside or outside the detention center. The man who has been ground by the system is not broken. The system is what is at risk of breaking, if the conscience of this country does not wake up. A diabetic man on a two-inch mattress in a freezing room, denied his blood-sugar checks, denied his Friday prayers, denied his Eid, more than eighty days, in the country he has lived in for thirty-three years. That is the picture. What we do with the door that the federal judge has cracked open is the question the prophets, and the Gospel, and the Qur’an, and the liberation theologians, and the Catholic Worker houses, and the Buddhist monasteries of this country have been asking us for a very long time. What we do with the door.