A Judge Ruled Trump Can Deport Salah Sarsour. But the Fight Is Not Over Yet.

Shortly before announcing his own retirement, a federal immigration judge in Chicago ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration can deport Palestinian-American human rights activist Salah Sarsour under a controversial law that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used to target activists who speak out against Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Sarsour is an award-winning human rights activist and the president of the largest mosque in Wisconsin, where he is a beloved advocate and organizer. Along with anti-genocide activists such as Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, Sarsour was targeted for removal after he was singled out by Zionist groups in response to his advocacy for Palestine, making his case a major test of the First Amendment under President Donald Trump.

“While today’s decision is deeply disappointing, I will not give up,” Sarsour said in a statement on Wednesday.

After four hearings featuring testimony from multiple witnesses, the judge rejected allegations that Sarsour obtained his green card through fraud and falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in order to vote. Sarsour had denied both charges.

However, under a Cold War-era law that has been weaponized by the Trump administration to target pro-Palestine activists and make a fascist spectacle of their arrests, the judge ruled Sarsour can be deported based on Secretary Rubio’s assertion that his advocacy for Palestinian liberation could have “adverse consequences” for U.S. foreign-policy interests.

The judge also deferred to Israeli charges against Sarsour dating to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Sarsour was growing up in the West Bank. At a previous deportation hearing, Sarsour’s former attorney brought up his client’s experience in Israel’s military court system, sharing with the deportation court that Israeli intelligence officers tortured him so severely that they brought him to a hospital.

“The decision by a U.S. judge to deport Salah Sarsour based on information from a country committing genocide and known for the torture of Palestinian prisoners is shocking,” said Janan Najeeb, executive director of the Muslim Women’s Coalition, in an email. “He has been a long time member of our community, he is socially involved with people of all backgrounds, and he represents the best of America.”

Sarsour was ultimately convicted in that Israeli military court system, which convicts over 96 percent of Palestinians charged. Experts during Sarsour’s deportation hearings testified that Israel regularly arrests Palestinian youth on bogus charges based on false confessions extracted using torture.

“In my case, all evidence was thrown aside, and instead, a foreign country’s false information and unjust military courts were used to trample on my rights and ignore the truth,” Sarsour said. “But this fight is bigger than me, and I will not stop standing up for what’s right and for justice in Palestine.”

After being jailed and tortured by Israel as a teenager, Sarsour came to the United States in the 1990s as a lawful permanent resident. His family includes his six citizen children.

“A great deal of evidence that we presented was ignored,” said Patrick Taurel, one of Sarsour’s attorneys, during a press conference on Wednesday. “We know the records ICE filed were incomplete, and we know the government of Israel had no evidence — none — that Salah engaged in these activities for which he was convicted, besides false confessions [written] in Hebrew.”

Sarsour is a board member of American Muslims for Palestine and was arrested by federal agents near his home in March after years of pro-Palestine advocacy. By fighting against his own deportation, Sarsour said he is defending a “vision of America where everyone can speak out against injustice without fear of government retaliation.”

The removal proceedings against pro-Palestine activists with green cards are the result of a partnership between far right and Zionist groups and senior members of the Trump administration that aims to crush pro-Palestine organizing and silence advocates for Palestinian liberation, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who led anti-genocide protests at Columbia University, filed a lawsuit in July alongside the Center for Constitutional Rights against Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and others. They allege that Project Esther has served as a blueprint for dismantling the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses, violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, which Congress passed in 1871 to address violent white supremacist paramilitaries during the southern Reconstruction.

Khalil has also sued Columbia University for failing to protect pro-Palestine student activists from harassment and political retaliation.

Project Esther and related campaigns attacked activists with baseless accusations of “terrorism” and “antisemitism” in order to make them targets for deportation. Like Sarsour, Khalil was also arrested at his home in March. Khalil spent 104 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, including at a prison in Louisiana that is more than 1,000 miles from his family in New York.

In September 2025, a federal court in Massachusetts found that targeting non-citizen students and faculty for arrest and deportation due to their political speech is unconstitutional. The landmark ruling by Judge William G. Young declared that non-citizens have the same free speech rights as citizens under the First Amendment.

However, in Sarsour’s case, Judge Jayme Salinardi ruled that Rubio’s letter identifying Sarsour’s advocacy as a threat to U.S. foreign policy is sufficient evidence for removal from the U.S. regardless of whether Rubio’s claims are factual, according to Taurel.

“You have to throw any notion that you have about due process out the window, the judge cannot act as a fact finder in this case,” Taurel said.

Salinardi was brought in from out of state to oversee Sarsour’s case and announced his retirement in court shortly after issuing the ruling. Immigration courts have suffered a wave of resignations and retirements by judges amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which has clogged the system and severely undermined due process.

Unlike the independent federal judiciary, immigration courts are separately run by the Department of Justice, where Salinardi and other judges are employees. They are ultimately under the Trump administration’s purview and can be fired; the administration has already purged more than 100 immigration judges.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has boasted about reducing immigration from majority Muslim countries by 96 percent and has stripped refugees of their legal protections — unless they are white people from South Africa.

“We know that there is a tremendous amount of pressure on immigration judges at this point in time, and we feared this outcome,” Taurel said. “But Salah is determined to continue speaking out. He has the soul of a lion, he will not be silenced, and he will not be cowed.”

The next step for Sarsour’s team is filing with the Board of Immigration Appeals, where they are expected to argue that Sarsour is likely to face persecution and torture if he is returned to Palestine under the Israeli occupation. Under federal laws that codify the UN Convention Against Torture, the government cannot deport people to countries where they are likely to face persecution.

If the Board of Immigration Appeals rejects Sarsour’s arguments, then his team will appeal to a federal district appeals court where, unlike Salinardi, the judges are independent from the Trump administration.

“We believe we will be vindicated on appeal when we get out of the immigration court system and get into an independent court,” Taurel said. “He is going to be here for the foreseeable future.”