By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – Islamic Society of Milwaukee President Salah Sarsour, who is a Palestinian American, has been detained by the U.S. 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 U.S. for over three decades and was detained on Monday. He grew up in the Israeli-occupied 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 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. Though Israel has ratified the U.N. convention against torture, Israeli rights group B’Tselem says military courts in the West Bank, where Palestinians are tried for alleged crimes, have a 96 percent conviction rate and a history of extracting confessions through torture.
Atta denied that Sarsour supported the militant group Hamas.
Sarsour is “being targeted on the basis of his Palestinian and Muslim background, and his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” the mosque said.
The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, confirmed his arrest and accused Sarsour of lying on his immigration forms and alleged that he was “suspected of funding terror organizations.”
DHS said he came to the U.S. in 1993. Noting his past conviction, it said he was previously “convicted for throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of Israeli armed forces.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has pursued an immigration crackdown condemned by rights groups as being in violation of due process and free speech. Advocacy groups say it has created an unsafe environment for minorities.
Trump has particularly cracked down on pro-Palestinian voices by attempting to deport foreign protesters, threatening funding freeze for universities where protests were held and ordering screening of immigrants’ online comments.
The crackdown has faced judicial obstacles. Many of the protesters targeted for deportation have been freed from detention by court orders while their cases proceed. Judges have also blocked some of Trump’s attempts to freeze funds for universities.
Trump alleges protesters are antisemitic and support extremists. Demonstrators, including some Jewish groups, say he wrongly conflates criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza with antisemitism and advocacy for Palestinian rights as supporting extremism.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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