Is Salah Sarsour, President of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee Whom ICE Detained, Really Innocent?

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Salah Sarsour is the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. He came to America in 1993, and is a legal permanent resident, but his past has now caught up with him. It turns out that he lied on his immigration application, which is grounds for deportation. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on Salah Sarsour can be found here: “ICE detains Palestinian-American mosque president in Wisconsin ‘with no cause,’ mosque says,” Reuters, April 3, 2026:

Islamic Society of Milwaukee President Salah Sarsour, who is a Palestinian American, has been detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the mosque said on Thursday.

ISM, which is Wisconsin’s largest mosque, said Sarsour, 53, is a legal permanent resident who has lived in the US for over three decades and was detained on Monday. He grew up in the West Bank.

“He was pulled over while driving by over 10 ICE agents with no cause,” a page on the mosque’s website said, adding he was taken out of the state to a detention facility in Chicago before being transferred to a detention center in Indiana.

The mosque claims Sarsour was “pulled over… with no cause.” But there was good cause. For ICE had learned that in 1993, Sarsour had lied on his immigration application.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel cited Othman Atta, the executive director of the mosque, as saying that deportation documents focused on Sarsour’s arrest by Israeli authorities as a teenager living in the West Bank to argue he provided material support for extremists.

Atta said Sarsour was convicted as a teenager in an Israeli military court, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Atta denied that Sarsour supported the terrorist group Hamas.

Sarsour is “being targeted on the basis of his Palestinian and Muslim background, and his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” the mosque said….

Sarsour has not been “targeted” for being either Muslim or a Palestinian, but has been detained because of evidence that he lied on his immigration forms.

All of these claims suggesting Sarsour is an innocent, picked up by a vindictive Trump administration out to persecute “Palestinians,” are preposterous. Where is the evidence that Sarsour was picked up for his advocacy of “Palestinian” rights, or for just being a “Palestinian”? The American government had been given information that Sarsour had been arrested in Israel for taking part in a jihad terrorist attack — throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of Israeli soldiers — information that he did not disclose on his immigration papers in 1993. There is also evidence that in Milwaukee, Sarsour helped to “fund terrorist organizations.”

Now he has been detained. He will be given a hearing, where the government will be able to present its proof of his having lied on his immigration papers, and what’s more, will present further evidence that, once he was admitted to the United States, he continued to conceal his conviction in Israel on terrorism charges that, had they been known at the time, would have prevented his becoming a citizen. And Salah Sarsour will have his CAIR-supported lawyer create a media circus as he continues to insist he is an innocent victim of an “Islamophobic” administration. At the same hearing the government will also present its evidence of Sarsour’s “funding of terrorist organizations.” Let the judicial games begin, and this time, despite the best efforts of Sarsour and his lawyer, may the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, win out.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.