An immigration judge in Wisconsin ruled Wednesday that Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a 30-year US resident, can be deported under a rarely invoked law allowing the Secretary of State to declare a non-citizen's presence harmful to foreign policy. The ruling hinged almost entirely on a June 2025 memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserting Sarsour's actions "undermine US foreign policy to combat antisemitism around the world." The judge found his hands tied by an earlier ruling in the Mahmoud Khalil case, which established that a Secretary of State letter alone can be sufficient to make someone deportable on foreign policy grounds. The structural significance here is not one man's deportation case — it is the precedent architecture being assembled. The Khalil ruling, now reinforced by the Sarsour decision, means the Secretary of State can effectively render any non-citizen deportable by issuing a memo, with no judicial review of the underlying evidence. Judge Salinardi could not "look behind" Rubio's decision to examine the factual basis for it. As Sarsour's attorney Patrick Taurel put it: "If the Secretary of State says the person is deportable, it is game over." Notably, the government lost on its other arguments. Salinardi rejected the allegation that Sarsour lied on his green card application and rejected the claim he falsely claimed citizenship to vote. The only argument that survived was the one requiring no evidentiary scrutiny — the Rubio memo itself. This pattern — executive assertion replacing evidentiary burden — is the load-bearing mechanism. Sarsour's decades-old Israeli convictions form the background narrative the administration has used to frame him as a security threat. He was imprisoned in 1988 after confessing to throwing stones and a Molotov cocktail at Israeli military personnel, and convicted again in 1995 over weapons charges. Sarsour denies the offences. His former lawyer Jawad Boulos testified that confessions were coerced through torture and that Sarsour was not convicted of any offence tying him to a designated terrorist organization. Sarsour's lawyers challenged the Israeli military court system itself, where secret evidence can be used and Palestinians can be denied access to lawyers for extended periods. The judge gave what Taurel called "extreme deference" to Israeli government records submitted by ICE. Deportation is not imminent. Sarsour's legal team has 60 days to argue he faces risk of torture if returned — a claim with concrete grounding, given his testimony that Israel's Shin Bet took him to hospital while in custody. If that fails, they will appeal. Taurel confirmed Sarsour cannot be deported while the appeal is pending. Separately, a federal judge ordered Sarsour's release from ICE custody in June after 81 days of detention, finding a "substantial" case that the government was retaliating against him for speaking out about Palestinian rights. The Trump administration has appealed that release. The case sits alongside the Khalil and Mahdawi deportation proceedings as the third use of this foreign-policy deportation mechanism against pro-Palestinian advocates. The pattern is now clear enough to evaluate structurally: executive memo triggers deportation proceedings, judicial review is blocked by precedent treating the memo as unreviewable, and the target's decades of lawful residence and community standing become irrelevant. Attorney Luna Droubi named the downstream question plainly: "Do I have the right to speak out about issues that matter to me? What if I draw a political cartoon? Am I going to be arrested and detained because of that?" Sarsour said deportation to the occupied West Bank "means the end of my life." The judge named Jordan as an alternative destination, but Sarsour's lawyers say he is not a Jordanian citizen and has no right to live there, and they believe he could ultimately be returned to the West Bank and Israeli custody if sent to Jordan. The case continues.
