ICE Arrests Palestinian Green Card Holder, Echoing Cases Against Pro-Palestinian Activists

Nearly a dozen ICE agents surrounded Salah Sarsour's car outside his Franklin, Wisconsin home on March 30, detaining a man who has lived in the United States for more than 32 years, raised six American-born children, and led Wisconsin's largest Islamic organization for five years. For his attorneys and Milwaukee's elected officials, the arrest poses a direct question about whether the Trump administration is using immigration enforcement machinery built around an antisemitism executive order to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.

Sarsour, 53, arrived as a conditional resident in 1993 and obtained his green card in 1998. He has no criminal record in the United States. As volunteer board president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, he has become one of the most prominent Muslim civic voices in Wisconsin. His wife of 34 years and all six of his children are U.S. citizens; he has nine grandchildren.

The government is invoking Secretary of State Marco Rubio's authority to designate someone a "foreign policy threat," the assertion that a person's continued presence poses adverse foreign policy consequences. That is precisely the mechanism used against Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student arrested by ICE on March 8, 2025, in the first publicly known Trump-era deportation effort targeting pro-Palestinian activism. Khalil, also a lawful permanent resident, was ruled deportable by a Louisiana immigration judge but was released on bail in June 2025 and is appealing to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The policy framework traces to January 29, 2025, when President Trump signed Executive Order 14188, directing federal agencies to use "all available and appropriate legal tools" to prosecute or remove perpetrators of antisemitic harassment. Since then, the administration revoked $400 million in federal grants from Columbia University, sent warning letters to 60 universities, and began screening immigrants' social media accounts for pro-Palestinian content. The Southern Poverty Law Center has said the order has been used as "a pretext to advance its political agenda," including deporting legal permanent residents.

DHS confirmed the detention, with Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis calling Sarsour "a terrorist" convicted for "throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of Israeli armed forces" and alleging he lied on his green card application. DHS did not specify what information it claims was false.

His attorneys say each allegation fails under examination. Sarsour was convicted by an Israeli military court as a teenager, before he ever entered the United States; attorneys say the charges, presented to him in Hebrew, a language he did not speak, involved throwing rocks, not Molotov cocktails, and that he was tortured into a confession. Most damaging to the fraud allegation, attorneys argue the U.S. government has known about that conviction since 1993, when Sarsour first applied to enter the country. Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has documented that West Bank military courts carry a 96 percent conviction rate and a recorded history of extracting confessions through torture.

The Muslim Legal Fund of America filed a writ of habeas corpus seeking his release. Its head of Immigration Litigation, Kathryn Brady, said the government's current position is "difficult to believe" as anything other than "a violation of his First Amendment right to speak about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank." Attorney Munjed Ahmad said the arrest was designed "to stifle the discourse on the Palestinian narrative." A hearing in Chicago Immigration Court is scheduled for April 13, though Ahmad said he expected it to be postponed.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson called the detention "an outrage," writing that there is "no substantive evidence he has done anything wrong." Wisconsin State Senator Chris Larson said he was "horrified." About 200 supporters rallied on April 2 calling for Sarsour's release.

The foreign policy threat designation carries no evidentiary requirement comparable to a criminal charge and does not require proof of any wrongdoing within U.S. jurisdiction. In Khalil's case, federal courts scrutinized whether it was being deployed to suppress constitutionally protected speech, and courts have blocked some related enforcement actions on First Amendment grounds. That same judicial test now applies to a grandfather from Franklin, Wisconsin, who has lived under American law for three decades without a single domestic criminal charge.