Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee — Wisconsin’s largest Islamic organization — was detained by ICE while driving on March 30. Separately, a dozen deportees were flown from the United States to Uganda, with legal advocacy groups describing the operation as transnational repression.
These are being reported as separate stories. They are not separate stories.
Sarsour is a Palestinian-American community leader. His arrest by immigration authorities — not criminal authorities — follows a pattern of using immigration enforcement mechanisms against individuals whose activities are constitutionally protected but politically inconvenient.
The Uganda deportations raise different but related questions. Sending people to a country with documented human rights concerns, under conditions that advocates describe as repressive, extends the reach of US enforcement power beyond American borders in ways that should concern anyone who takes due process seriously.
The Department of Homeland Security has simultaneously been purchasing commercial data that would normally require a warrant, demanding social media platforms expose anti-ICE accounts, and expanding mass surveillance capabilities targeting activists. Each of these has been reported as an individual story. Together, they describe something more systematic.
Is there a pattern? The individual facts are documented. The connection between them is left to the reader.
