On March 30, twelve Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles descended on a Milwaukee neighborhood to arrest Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian American green card holder who has lived here for over thirty years. Since that day, Sarsour has been detained in Clay County Jail, an ICE-contracting prison in Brazil, Indiana.

Sarsour has long advocated for justice in Palestine at local and national levels. Currently, he is president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee as well as a longtime organizer with American Muslims for Palestine. In a city with a diverse Muslim community, including the largest population of Rohingya immigrants in the United States, Sarsour is beloved for his embrace of new arrivals as well as his ongoing community and interfaith work. He is a father of six and a grandfather of nine; while in detention, he missed the birth of one grandchild.

The kidnapping and detention of Salah Sarsour are reprisals for his advocacy for Palestine. The global outpouring of solidarity with Palestine against the ongoing Israeli genocide since October 7, 2023, has produced a dramatic expansion of repression against protest in the United States and Western Europe. The detention of advocates like Sarsour is part of this campaign.

Prior to Sarsour’s arrest, Canary Mission, a shadowy website that purports to expose anti-Israel, “antisemitic” actors, identified Sarsour, without evidence, as “reportedly a Hamas activist and fundraised [sic] for terrorist organizations.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) charges against him echo Canary Mission. They reference his participation in “anti-Israel activities” when he was a teenager in the West Bank and allege that he somehow concealed this past on arrival to the United States.

Before leaving his home in the West Bank, Sarsour spent two years in Israeli jails, enduring months of torture at age fifteen. Such treatment of children is commonplace under Israeli administrative detention; currently, Israel detains about seven hundred children a year. Three-quarters of the children detained undergo torture.

The United States refuses to condition its copious support for Israel on the cessation of child detention, which is illegal under international law. In fact, the United States follows Israel’s example: DHS detentions of children have escalated dramatically under the current war against immigrants. Given the well-documented exchange of security information and policing techniques between the two countries, there is no way that Sarsour could have concealed his history from the DHS when entering the country.

While stoking the virulent antisemitism of its white nationalist and Christian Zionist constituencies, the Trump administration pursues repressive policies against Palestine solidarity in the name of fighting antisemitism. Supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), thirty-eight states have adopted legislation codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which defines criticism of Israel as antisemitic. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers failed to veto such legislation three days before the ICE vehicles convened in Milwaukee to arrest Sarsour.

The Heritage Foundation has been busy, scouring US legal history to justify DHS violations of established civil liberties. As Marco Rubio’s deployment of the McCarran–Walter Act indicates, there is a rich archive available to justify harsh repression against foreign-born organizers. Historically, such repression rarely limits itself to non-citizens, eventually migrating to include all dissident voices.

As he did with prior arrests of foreign-born, pro-Palestine organizers, such as Rümeysa Özturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and Mohsen Madawi, Rubio refers to section 237a 4(c) of the McCarran–Walter Act to claim that Sarsour’s presence in the country “threatens” US foreign policy. In the past, courts have found these detentions illegal and ordered the organizers released, though the federal government continues to pursue their deportations.

The weaponization of arcane legislation from the Cold War augments the legacy of Islamophobia unleashed by the “war on terror.” The contemporary assault against pro-Palestine organizers deploys McCarthyist tactics, including allegations of guilt by association and the use of coerced and compromised witnesses to incriminate widening circles of people. Freighted with the legacy of McCarthyist immigration law, the current campaign against Palestine solidarity mobilizes Islamophobia and xenophobia against community formations. Sarsour’s kidnapping is part of this project.

Writing at the height of McCarthyism, historian Richard Hofstadter described a “paranoid style” common to American right-wing politics in 1959. Five years later, in his influential essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadterconnected anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic animus in the nineteenth century to the anti-communism of his own era. A Jew and former member of the American Communist Party, Hofstadter knew this “paranoid style” well, having lost key career opportunities because of antisemitism and anti-communism.

Hofstadter would have been aware of the impact of the Smith Act, which was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. The Smith Act required all “non-citizen aliens” to register with the federal government and criminalized membership in the Communist Party, making it a deportable offense.

Two years later, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which dictated the removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Two-thirds of the Japanese Americans affected by this policy were US citizens. The Smith Act facilitated the removal. Similarly, President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” mandates registration for noncitizens, laying the groundwork for their detention and eventual deportation.

With the inauguration of the international Cold War after World War II, fear of communism enflamed US public policy. Congress overrode President Harry Truman’s veto of the McCarran–Walter Act in 1952, implementing a sprawling law that reinstated Smith Act measures against noncitizens associated in any way, even in the distant past, with communist organizing. Most of those targeted for deportation on political grounds in this period were, like Salah Sarsour, long-term residents with deep roots in the United States.

In the immediate post–World War II period, almost anyone involved in labor unions or other progressive groups would have had connections with communists, who had been actively involved in grassroots political organizing before World War II. Anti-communist policies undermined the work of civil rights and labor groups, criminalizing their activities, limiting their rights of freedom of expression, and jailing citizens and noncitizens alike on charges of “subversive activities.”

The McCarran–Walter Act concerned itself with legislating immigration and naturalization in an era of expanding US global power, ensuring the US citizenship of children born abroad to citizens serving in the military. The law reinstituted the racist “national origins” quotas that favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe, thereby restricting the abilities of Eastern European Jews displaced in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust to find safe harbor in the United States. Above all, it sought to contend the threat it saw in ways well described by Hofstadter as being posed by communists and “Jewish interests.”

The effects of McCarthyist policy led to the prominent case of the “Terminal Island Four,” foreign-born immigrant rights activists detained at Los Angeles’s Terminal Island for deportation. Two of the four, Rose Chernin and David Hyun, both targeted for their associations with left-leaning labor organizations as well as their work with the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born, fought deportation for years. After protracted struggles involving national advocacy, they both prevailed, with the Supreme Court striking down the Smith Act provision about membership in the Communist Party in Chernin’s case in 1957.

Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the McCarran–Walter Act holds that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” This is the clause Rubio has invoked against Khalil, Madawi, Özturk, Kordia, and Sarsour.

Often invoked to terrorize foreign-born organizers, this clause remains part of federal immigration law. But it has never been successfully used to deport anyone, despite being bolstered by a 1990 amendment again articulating the right of the secretary of state to deport any noncitizen whose presence might “adversely affect” foreign policy.

Demonstrating conclusively that an individual “adversely affects” US foreign policy priorities has proven difficult. But that hasn’t stopped federal efforts to deploy this policy against those it deems to be internal enemies. As with the cases of Chernin and Hyun, these cases have sometimes taken years, with the lives of those accused hanging in the balance all the while.

In the case of the “Los Angeles Eight,” for example, the government arrested seven Palestinian Americans and one Kenyan American, then tried for twenty years to deport two of them, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, on grounds of their alleged support for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Close to the twenty-year anniversary of the arrest of the LA Eight, an immigration judge ruled that the government violated Hamide and Shehadeh’s constitutional rights and had little case against them, even under the surviving provision of the McCarran–Walter Act.

Marc Ven Der Hout, a National Lawyers Guild advocate representing the two, commented on the ruling: “The government cannot continue to try to deport these permanent residents who did nothing but try to advocate for Palestinians’ right to a homeland — hardly a revolutionary belief in the 21st century.”

While anti-communism remains a staple of right-wing invective, the paranoid style of the US right wing in the twenty-first century focuses on the threats posed by immigrants and Muslims. Journalist Spencer Ackerman shows how enhanced counterterrorism policies deployed against Muslims and Arabs have facilitated ICE’s violent repression against foreign-born communities in general.

Inaugurated immediately after 9/11, the National Security Entry–Exit Registration System (NSEERS) created a Smith Act–style mandatory registration for Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities. Close to 90,000 men and boys registered under the NSEERS program. While no terrorist activities were detected, thousands were detained, and immigration infractions such as failure to extend a visa resulted in over 13,000 removal proceedings.

Sources like Canary Mission continue to invent dangerous alliances between pro-Palestine organizations, Muslims, democratic socialists, and immigrants. Steeped in such paranoid theories, the shooter who murdered eleven at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh believed that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was meeting there to plot the replacement of white Christians by Jews and immigrants.

When the state takes up the paranoid style as public policy, it invariably compromises civil liberties for everyone. Milwaukee and the world need Salah Sarsour to be freed from prison and the baseless charges against him, so he can come home and continue his important work for our collective liberation.

This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.