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.
Hellbound and Down 