ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, have not commented.
The president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee (ISM), Salah Sarsour, who is Palestinian-American, was detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the mosque said on Thursday (2). “He was stopped while driving by over 10 ICE agents for no reason,” said a page on the mosque’s website, adding that he was taken out of state to a detention center in Chicago before being transferred to a detention center in Indiana.
O ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, have not commented.. Wisconsin’s largest mosque, ISM said Sarsour, 53, is a legal permanent resident who has lived in the US for more than three decades and was detained on Monday. He grew up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Sarsour is “being targeted based on his Palestinian and Muslim background and his defense of Palestinian rights,” the mosque said.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted Othman Atta, the mosque’s executive director, as saying the deportation documents were based on Sarsour’s arrest by Israeli authorities when he was a teenager living in the West Bank on charges of providing material support to extremists.
Atta said Sarsour was convicted as a teenager in an Israeli military courtaccording to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Although Israel has ratified the UN convention against torture, Israeli rights group B’Tselem claims that military courts in the West Bank, where Palestinians are tried for alleged crimes, have a 96% conviction rate and a history of extracting confessions through torture.
O President Donald Trump’s government has implemented an immigration crackdown condemned by rights groupswho consider it a violation of due process and freedom of expression. Advocacy groups say an unsafe environment has been created for minorities.
*Reuters
