Attorneys for Marwan Marouf, who allegedly overstayed his visa in the United States by more than a decade, said on Nov. 21 that the 54-year-old will be deported to Jordan, where he is a citizen.
Federal officials alleged that, in addition to overstaying his visa, Marouf donated nearly $14,000 to the Holy Land Foundation, a terror organization, in the 1990s, reported Fox 4 in Dallas. The leaders of the foundation were subsequently convicted of sending $12 million to Hamas.
Marouf, who lives in Dallas, has been held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since his Sep. 22 arrest. ICE alleged that Marouf, who first came to the United States in 1993 on a student visa, re-entered the country without a valid visa after a 2011 trip. The federal government later added terrorism charges.
“ICE is executing its mission of identifying and removing criminal aliens and others who have violated our nation’s immigration laws,” an ICE official told JNS. “All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention, and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality.”
The Jordanian national’s attorneys sought to have their client allowed to deport himself voluntarily to Jordan, which would have given him 60 days to leave the country at his own expense. Immigration judge Abdias Tida denied that request.
Marouf’s attorney, Marium Uddin, legal director of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, told the court that Marouf accepted the decision and would not appeal.
“Accepting a removal order is not admitting any wrongdoing,” she said in her closing remarks to the court. She noted that she spoke on his behalf due to his heart condition, which can be exacerbated by stress.
“Marwan has determined his only real remaining option might be to bid us farewell and start anew elsewhere,” she said.
Citing the allegations about the Holy Land Foundation, the judge said that “my hands are tied.”
The Muslim Legal Fund of America attributed a quote to Tricia McLaughlin, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, stating that “if you are pushing Hamas propaganda, supporting terrorist organizations and conducting other anti-American actions, you will face consequences.”
‘The terrorism boogeyman’
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who recently designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations, commented on the new ruling that Marouf is to be deported.
“Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States,” the Republican stated, noting that the executive director of CAIR Texas “called him a ‘pillar of the community.’”
“This is another example of CAIR Texas’s support for Hamas and terror,” Abbott said.
Uddin, Marouf’s attorney, posted what she called a “closing argument that was never given” after the court’s ruling.
“Every good storybook, every movie, every courtroom drama has a boogeyman,” she said. “For Muslim Americans and Palestinian Americans, it has always been, invariably, without fail, the terrorism boogeyman.”
“The government’s playbook has grown tiresome: Holy Land Foundation every time. It has reached back over 20 years to summon the boogeyman in this courtroom drama,” she said.
“It’s the narrative driven to scare you, judge, into believing that Marwan—this soft-spoken, hardworking, family man and civic-minded community leader—was somehow a person harboring invidious and insidious intent,” she added, “penetrating the highest ranks of an official warehouse of sensitive and classified intel regarding a war across an ocean by Hamas against such notable heavyweights as Israel, its super-intelligence Mossad and therefore by proxy the United States.”
She also referred to “the government’s same tired playbook,” which says that “those fighters—those ‘terrorists’—possessed the reach to corrupt American nonprofit work, humanitarian giving and the honest labor of men like Marwan.”
