For six months, Salah Sarsour, a legal U.S. resident and the president of Wisconsin’s largest Islamic organization, has been fighting the Trump administration’s efforts to deport him.
But on Tuesday night, a federal immigration judge in Chicago ruled in favor of his removal, which means he could be ordered to leave the country unless he secures asylum or another form of legal relief.
Mr. Sarsour, 53, who grew up in the West Bank and is a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, leads the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and has lived in the United States for more than 30 years. He was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March and held for about 80 days in Indiana before a judge ordered his release in June.
His lawyers plan to appeal the Tuesday court ruling, which means Mr. Sarsour will not be immediately deported.
The government’s case against him goes back decades and crosses international borders. It cites charges that were brought against Mr. Sarsour by Israel during a Palestinian uprising when he was a teenager living in the occupied West Bank. Those charges resulted in his imprisonment.
He and his lawyers have argued that his detention by immigration officials this year was politically motivated, and they have accused the Trump administration of targeting pro-Palestinian speech and violating Mr. Sarsour’s First Amendment rights.
In an interview on Tuesday, before the decision, Mr. Sarsour said that federal officials had targeted him and other community leaders and demonstrators who had supported the rights of Palestinians during the Israel-Hamas war and who opposed American aid to Israel.
“I was not hiding,” he said. “I was saying that clearly. I believe they want to stop us.”
In pursuing Mr. Sarsour’s deportation, the Trump administration asserted broad power under a Cold-War era statute that says that the secretary of state can deem noncitizens deportable if their presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Congress has since tried to limit the power of that 1952 statute, and its use has been successfully challenged in court. Still, the Trump administration has used the statute to argue for the deportation of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, and to bring its case against Mr. Sarsour, according to his legal team. The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said last year that his department had used itsauthority to cancel hundreds of student visas.
In a statement after Mr. Sarsour’s arrest, the Department of Homeland Security said that Mr. Sarsour had been convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of members of the Israeli military before he moved to the United States, and of illegally attempting to possess weapons and ammunition.
Mr. Sarsour has denied committing the crimes that he was accused of in Israel.
In the interview on Tuesday, he said that he was first arrested when he was 15. At that time, expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank had prompted frequent Palestinian uprisings there, including what is now known as the first intifada, which began in 1987.
Mr. Sarsour said he was tortured while in detention, and that he had signed documents he could not understand because they were in Hebrew. And in a statement on Wednesday after the judge’s ruling, Mr. Sarsour said that “a foreign country’s false information and unjust military courts were used to trample on my rights and ignore the truth.”
Patrick Taurel, a lawyer for Mr. Sarsour, said on Wednesday after the ruling that the government of Israel had no evidence for the crimes other than coerced confessions. “We know that Israeli military tribunals are not places where you receive anything resembling due process.”
D.H.S. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to questions about Mr. Sarsour’s arrests in the 1980s and ’90s.
According to D.H.S., Mr. Sarsour entered the United States as a conditional resident in 1993 and obtained a green card in 1998.
In the United States, Mr. Sarsour became a business owner, a father of six and a grandfather of 10. ICE agents intercepted him while he was running an errand on March 30, and he was taken to a detention facility in Clay County, Ind.
There, Mr. Sarsour said, he encountered a filthy environment where he could not worship as he wanted to, did not receive adequate care for his Type 2 diabetes and did not see the sun for the entirety of his detention.
“Immediately it brought me these dark memories — what happened to me when I was a child in Palestine,” he said in the interview.
If Mr. Sarsour is eventually deported, it is not clear where he would go. The judge on this case, Jayme Salinardi, suggested that he would be sent to Jordan, an idea that Mr. Taurel challenged.
Mr. Sarsour said in his statement that he hoped to stay in the United States. “I will continue fighting to defend the right to free speech and to stay in the country I have called home for more than three decades,” he said.
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