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Noor Wadi is a Federal Criminal Defense Attorney and founder of Noor Wadi Law in McKinney, Texas. A former Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Northern District of Texas, she has spent her career at the intersection of criminal defense and immigration law, representing clients in habeas cases and defending against unlawful and prolonged ICE detention. She co-founded the Muslim Legal Society at University of Texas Law and has done extensive pro bono work for Spanish-speaking clients in asylum proceedings.
She sat down with Nuun Collective on April 16th for a talk on immigration, community organizing, and what it means to show up for others in a time of increased targeting of Muslim and immigrant communities. Below is a transcript from that event.
Note: This transcript has been slightly edited for readability in written format.
00:00 What Motivated you to Help Others?
Mustafa Syed: We’re very happy to have you here. It’s actually our 13th Nuun session, which is pretty cool. I think it’s 13, right? 13 or 14, I don’t know. We lost count. But as you mentioned, you were the founder of the Muslim Legal Society over at UT Law. You were a federal public defender. You did pro bono work for Spanish-speaking clients in asylum proceedings.
And most recently, you started your own firm to work as a federal criminal defense attorney. You’ve obviously centered your life around justice and looking out for others. A lot of people either willingly or unwillingly are kind of more focused on themselves. So which life experiences of yours really shaped your ideology and your perspective on helping others?
Noor Wadi: I’m excited to be here today and jazākAllāhu khayran for a very generous introduction. I think to start to answer that question, I have to throw out that I’m Palestinian. That by itself, you grow up knowing that there’s something that you have a right to that’s been taken from you, and that is enough to alter your perspective as a kid.
Hearing my father’s mom talk about the beautiful groves of pomelo oranges that they had in Yafa that she attended growing up and having to walk for three days after she was forcibly removed from her home in the Nakba in 1948, while she was carrying my oldest aunt, who was a 40-day-old newborn, hearing those stories growing up, knowing that’s your history, that’s your family’s legacy already kind of catapults you in the sense of like, I can’t just live for a 9 to 5 and, just making a comfortable life for myself here because then I’m forgetting the struggles that my family went through.
I think that that’s a huge part of it. But then also there’s like just growing up Muslim as well. The fact that there are so many ahadith saying Allah SWT helps us if we help our brother, and I need help. I would like help. So I would like to also be deserving of that help from Allah SWT.
I grew up in a small town in Missouri. I think a lot of people think that I was born and raised in Dallas. But I grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and it was the biggest town for a two-hour radius around, but it had a population of 40,000 people. So as one of, like, five Muslim families in that town, you couldn’t just mind your own business.
Everybody was in your business, especially post 9/11, everybody wanted to know about you, and I had a lot of conversations just organically throughout life with people who I might have been the first time they ever met a Muslim or Palestinian, and so kind of having to put myself out there unwillingly, I think, became something that I just wanted to do more intentionally with that.
03:25 Post 9/11 vs The Present
Mustafa Syed: I also grew up in a very small town, so that’s kind of how it is. So shifting gears to our current world we’re in. This time we’re going to America. In 2026, it’s a very scary time for a lot of people. It’s a very concerning time for a lot of people, especially a lot of very marginalized communities; very uncertain people are in a lot of fear.
And I think even though this may have happened before, it seems almost like this is a very unique situation for our generation in a lot of ways, because a lot of us in the audience especially, maybe we weren’t old enough to really understand the post 9/11 landscape of how it was for Muslims in America.
So how do you compare what’s going on now? Right, with eyes on these detentions and all sorts of stuff and targeting both Hispanic groups, Muslim groups, etc., and what the history of the other or other ism in the US.
Noor Wadi: So I guess I need a pulse check. Who here was alive during 9/11? Raise your hand if you were alive in 2001. Okay, so we got like half the room, but the other half. I was in third grade. Don’t do the math, but it was something that definitely changed my worldview. I wasn’t old enough, really, to understand how much of an impact that was going to have on my Muslim community or what that meant outside of day-to-day interactions with classmates saying rude things.
I would say that this does feel a lot like the post 9/11 world, but in a lot of ways it’s also better. I don’t think that that’s a common sentiment, but we can talk about Palestine publicly in a way that was never acceptable post 9/11 for us growing up. And that’s a huge narrative shift that’s a huge public opinion shift that has made it so that a lot of people are running their campaigns. This is a big election year. They’re running their campaigns specifically on rejecting AIPAC. That is unheard of. And although there’s a lot of heightened anti-Islamic sentiment and heightened use of every single arm of the US government to try to repress, I think it’s more now like a last-ditch, desperate attempt for the government to silence the narrative because of how popular it has become to be in support of oppressed people, and specifically to be critical of Israel.
05:55 The History of “The Other”
Mustafa Syed: I think we talked a little bit even before this event about, some of the like what was it like, like in the 60s and with McCarthyism and everything like that. Like what role did that play in? I guess, like, shaping the narratives around the other?
Noor Wadi: Yeah, we could start in the 60s just because it’s closer. But there’s a book that I really recommend called Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire by Deepa Kumar. Such a good book. And she starts in the 11th century and tracks Islamophobia over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Obviously it wasn’t called Islamophobia then, but this idea that the people in power can galvanize and unite various factions against a common enemy is a tale as old as time. And so it’s in this country now, you know, it’s Muslims and Palestinians. But in this country before, you know, we had the FBI with COINTELPRO against black rights activists, slave patrols against people who are freeing people from literal slavery and oppression, communists under McCarthyism. The fact that we had laws on the books called the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep people of Chinese descent from immigrating to this country. The fact that Japanese Americans were interned in mass, and the Supreme Court’s opinion on that is Korematsu.
They basically said that was bad. I hope it doesn’t happen again, but we can’t say the President is not allowed to do that. We just hope that they don’t do that again. That’s the law in this country. If you look up Korematsu, it’s still good. The law unfortunately has not been overturned.
Even certain factions of people who we now consider white were considered other at some point. Irish, Italians, Germans were all excluded in some way. And it’s all just different manifestations of white supremacy. It’s just different ways that what we may refer to now as the Epstein class.
But that rich white elite class that wants to maintain its hold over its wealth and over its power continues to do so by excluding people and, you know, pushing the goalposts of who is acceptable, who’s normal, who is considered okay under white supremacy.
08:25 Have Muslims Grown or Stayed the Same?
Mustafa Syed: So as much as I think, you know, the narrative around the US is one of maybe inclusion and diversity, a lot of times this oppression in America isn’t really new that we’re seeing. And I guess the question that comes is like, for all of us, do you think Muslims have stayed the same or have we maybe grown?
Noor Wadi: I think we have a lot of work to do as a community. We have definitely organized ourselves better. We’re a little more legally aware. We’re starting to get into elections more, but we are absolutely not where we should be in terms of organizing ourselves, in terms of caring about these issues. I feel like even this year was a wake-up call to a lot of our community members about the realities of ICE.
ICE has always been an agency that broke up families and took good people away from their homes, but I think this year was the first year that the Muslim community really realized that when our own loved ones were taken, we were like, whoa, you can’t take him. You know, he’s got no criminal record.
He’s a great man. It’s like so are tens of thousands of other men. Unfortunately, ICE has kidnapped them from their homes. And I think there’s a lot of education work that needs to be done to kind of open the community’s eyes. But then moving that towards organizing that the community is going to start doing, I hope, with time.
09:52 The Immigration System
Mustafa Syed: So kind of jumping into the topic of ICE. Can you explain to us how immigration works? In this country, from a legal standpoint and just how we should understand the immigration system?
Noor Wadi: Yeah, absolutely. I will give a little bit of my background first. Before doing that, I mentioned that I was a federal public defender, so I mainly did criminal defense. But it is a crime in this country to return to the country after deportation. So a lot of my work is because I speak Spanish as well.
Was most a lot of my docket was, or it still is helping individuals who are dealing, who are facing up to ten, 20 years in prison just for returning after deportation. It’s not enough. It’s not a defense to say, oh, I want asylum. If you’ve returned after deportation, you can maybe apply for asylum later, but they’re going to put you in prison for a certain amount of time before letting you do your immigration proceedings.
So that’s kind of where I started getting to learn more about the immigration system, how it impacts the criminal justice system. And then this year, specifically, I started taking out habeas cases, which we can talk a little bit more about as we talk about specific cases. But so I’m having to kind of against my own will, because when I was in law school, I was like, I’m not doing immigration law.
That’s not the area that I’m going to do, although it’s very necessary. I, I saw myself as like, I want to be in court, you know, and so now it’s like the two worlds are colliding. But now, with respect to ICE specifically, I’m sure you all have heard folks say like, abolish ICE. And people are like, well, how are we going to abolish ICE?
You know what we have? We have borders that we need to maintain. And don’t you guys care about nationalism, etc.? ICE didn’t always exist. So if we had a pre-ICE, we can have a post-ICE. ICE is specifically a post 9/11 invention. And so everything that you can think of that is associated with that level of discrimination and political motivation is 100% baked into ICE because it was established in March 2003.
Specifically, if you ask the. You listened to NPR interviews of the general counsel of ICE. They will say this was in response to 9/11 because we weren’t being strict enough on our borders.
So before that, it was a huge organization called the Immigration National Services, INS. But government officials just felt that it was that org was not strong enough because although they did have the power to arrest without warrants as they do now, they did not have the power to deport.
They also were the same agency that was responsible for sanctioning employers for hiring people who were undocumented and for, you know, granting people positive immigration rights. And so what they decided to do was to restructure it. And so now that INS has been set up three separate subgroups: USCIS, which is where, like our you know, you might have your family might have applied for visas or status through that; Customs and Border Protection, or Customs Enforcement.
The people who check to see if you brought too much cheese from Amman. When you come into the country, and then ICE, immigration Customs Enforcement. And so now we have a subdivision within the Department of Homeland Security whose whole focus is just finding, arresting, and deporting people, which didn’t exist before.
And so it kind of created this more honed-in effect, and depending on the president and what his priorities are, that branch is, is more powerful or less powerful. And we’re seeing now that they’re using every single ounce of power that the statute provides to affect Trump’s administration.
13:54 Why does the Immigration Process take so long?
Mustafa Syed: Wow. When we talk about immigration, a lot of times we hear about cases where somebody’s been in the country for decades, and they still don’t have legal status. So why do these immigration processes, why do they take so long? And then maybe in the cases with ICE, why does it seem like fair judgment might just be absent?
Noor Wadi: So there are two levels to why immigration benefits are taking a long time. The first is just it’s a bureaucracy, the same way it takes a long time when you stand in line at the DMV to get anything done, and then you show up after being in line for two hours, and they say, oh, you forgot one paper, you know, come back in two months.
Right. So it’s that. But then there’s also the Karp program, which was a program that still exists today, where they take certain individuals who they can’t deny benefits to, but they also don’t want to grant them benefits and just leave them in this pending purgatory. And so those individuals have found success by suing the Department of Homeland Security and saying, hey, it’s been ten years, and I haven’t gotten anything, and nothing has moved on this case.
You haven’t asked me for more documentation, and I don’t want to live in a pending status forever. And they’ve had to sue all the way, you know, through federal court to get their status granted to them. And it’s like not a lot of people can afford to do that. That’s expensive. Like suing- even just filing a case could cost like, I’m not talking about the attorneys’ fees, but like, actually filing with the court.
The court will have a fee of like $ 300 to $400. And so we’re starting there and then adding attorney’s fees on top of it. And, you know, appeal fees if you’re going to continue the case forward. And so a lot of people just choose to let it pend and see what happens. And unfortunately, sometimes what happens is ICE shows up and says, hey, you don’t have status anymore.
And we’re going to start the deportation process. So that’s on the USCIS side. You want me to kind of talk a little bit about why there doesn’t seem to be much justice in the removal proceedings on the ICE side.
So a part of the immigration court system, it’s not really a court. When I say that, I mean, it’s not a court under article three of the Constitution. It is a bunch of employees of the executive branch. So the Department of Homeland Security is the judge, jury, and executioner in the immigration system, period.
You got a DHS officer, the Department of Homeland Security, DHS officer that arrests an individual, and then a DHS attorney that argues for the deportation, and then a DHS employee who is a judge, a DHS judge who orders the deportation, and they are all accountable to the president. And we just saw. I mean, I’m sure y’all might have seen the articles that came out recently about the judges that were fired for refusing to deport Ramsey Öztürk and Mohsin Badawi, two pro-Palestinian activists.
So those judges didn’t deny the deportation proceedings and now don’t have jobs because it’s not a true judge position. At the end of the day, it’s a DHS employee. And so you find that a lot of these judges think, you know, even if they personally believe what’s going on in the case is wrong, the bigger picture for them is, oh, I can do more good by staying in this position.
So let me just side with the government on this one. And, and hopefully it all comes out in the wash down the line, I guess. And and that’s, that’s those are the ones that you want to give the benefit of the doubt. And then some are just ideologically; they want to do what Trump appointed them to do.
So that’s why in the immigration court system, you end up with a lot of losses before you’re ever even able to appeal it to a federal judge to review.
16:00 The Immigration Judges are under the Executive Branch
Mustafa Syed: So it’s almost like, you know, they’re not always. They’re not all part of the same agenda, but they might feel like they can be that change in that position somehow.
Noor Wadi: Yeah, I would say. I mean, so every president gets to hire DHS judges and hire DHS employees. And every time there’s a shift between parties, you’ll see just mass firings and mass like shifts, the ones that stick around. Like, let’s say, the Biden appointees who still haven’t been fired, which again, the judge for Ozturk and for Badawi were Biden appointees, and they were kind of sliding under the radar.
It’s just a matter of time before they do enough things that are not in line with the current administration that they find themselves having lost their jobs. And you know, it’s at will. There’s no recourse for them, and so that becomes a big part of it.
19:40 The Case of Marwan Marouf
Mustafa Syed: So switching gears, obviously, to something a little more serious and more personal. I think, you know, it’s why we actually chose to host this session here at MAS: the situation with the brother of Marwan. So Kamran was talking to me offline about how emotional it was for all of us and for you, especially seeing Brother Marwan’s case up close.
So what is it like? You know, when we see someone, you know, from the community as a lawyer, like as from a lawyer point of view, you’re someone who, you know, you understand the law, you understand all these criminal proceedings, you understand, you know, and maybe you even feel like you have some sorts of agency over what can happen because of your, your qualifications. So, you know, what do you do when it seems like the system is failing?
Noor Wadi: No, it’s definitely emotional. And it continues to be emotional. I mean, having Ramadan without Marwan, the community kind of grieves that in a way. We try to resume, and we’re happy that he’s free from the shackles of the US. But it’s still a huge, huge blow to the community and to people who kind of grew up in this area knowing Marwan and his impact on them. Um, and actually, his case is part of the reason why I started looking into figuring out how to do habeas so that I can be.
21:09 Defining Habeas Corpus
Mustafa Syed: Could you define habeas for the audience?
Noor Wadi: Okay. How technical do you want to be? Because habeas corpus is Latin for have the body, which is very morbid, but basically it’s any situation where someone is arrested, and you believe that arrest to be unjust or that detention to be unjust; you will petition for a federal court to produce that individual and basically set them free.
And so you can do it on immigration cases; you could do it in even criminal cases in certain situations. It’s more that’s more for like an appeal. But at some point, in a criminal case, you might be able to request habeas. And it’s a little bit different than you’re not. You’re not attacking the underlying issue or the case.
You’re saying the detention of that individual is unlawful for XYZ reason. So that’s what I’ve been trying to learn because there’s a huge need for that now, especially with the increase in unlawful and unduly prolonged detentions of individuals. So as an attorney, I would say it motivated me in a way to want to better my own skill set.
But I also say that, you know, if you’re an attorney in this space and you aren’t emotional, and your clients and your cases aren’t moving you, and this is just a job, then find another area of law. You can make really good money as a real estate attorney. You can go in-house at Costco or something, but like taking up space in the advocacy field where you don’t genuinely feel torn by what’s going on with your clients, I think is a disservice to the individuals that you’re representing.
Now, on the other hand, if your emotions about a case lead you to the point that you feel helpless, I think you also need to take a break because that’s burnout and that’s real. That can happen. Especially with how bleak things are starting to look in the legal system. So you have to find a balance.
Not helpless, not heartless, but having a realistic perspective of what you can do to help and keeping your client motivated and keeping your client feeling like the fight is going to keep going. Even if after you leave the courtroom, you feel torn up. Because ultimately, especially in the deportation context, the system was designed to crush people.
I don’t know if you guys have been watching. In her interviews, she was explaining that from her perspective as a detainee, she felt that the detention ICE attention was designed specifically to get people to beg to be deported. To say, I know that I have rights and I know that I can win this case, but please just get me out of here.
So as an attorney, your job is to kind of help boost your client’s morale when they’re in that very difficult, dark place. And to know that the law still means something in this country as much as the Trump administration wishes that it doesn’t. When we are finally getting in front of impartial federal judges, we are winning.
We’re winning in front of the judges who apply the law and not political ideology. And you’ll find a lot of that in the federal system: judges who have been appointed for a long, long time. And so they’re not impacted by the everyday changes in the political landscape. And so keeping that perspective in mind, too.
I know we’re not here to talk about, like, the anti-Islam cases, but a lot of those, you know, Abbott has been running his mouth on Twitter and then in court, just losing. And then he never hears about it again because he doesn’t want to admit that he lost the cases. And CAIR keeps winning against him over and over again.
So, you know, it’s bleak, but it’s not helpless. That’s what I would say as an attorney.
23:25 The System was Designed to Crush You
Mustafa Syed: So would you say the system is working, or do you think the system, or, you know, is the system just inherently broken? We have to kind of figure out how to work around it, I think.
Noor Wadi: I think the system needs a push from us. I think when we as attorneys get in there, you know, we can make all the arguments that we want. But Sami Hamdi said this really well about his own situation here when he was finally released: that the law works better when people are pressuring, when the public is pressuring for things to happen in the way that they’re supposed to happen. There are a lot of cases where injustices prevail because the judges don’t think twice about it and think, you know, it’s just another day, another docket.
It’s going to push this along and not really worry about what the broader impact is. Having community packed the court and be present and talking to press and uplifting the narrative helps because, you know, judges read the news and they know what’s going on, too. And so it helps them contextualize like, oh, this is going to impact more than just this individual in my courtroom. I think the system needs us to keep our foot on its neck.
26:21 How do we pressure them from outside?
Mustafa Syed: So I guess, what is that? You know, more specifically, what does that outside work look like? You know, is it just protest? Is it, you know, what is the form that should be taking? And I guess, like, especially as Muslims, how should we, I guess, put that into our own context and perspective and I guess, like, you know, spiritual worldview.
Noor Wadi: We have to be organized. I was listening to a lecture by Imam Tom Cecchini, and he was saying something along the lines of, if we can’t get 10,000 Muslims to drink a cup of chai on a Thursday at 8 p.m., we’re not going to be able to get all of those Muslims to go vote for a specific issue, or come out to a specific protest, or apply pressure in a specific way.
We have organizations, but we don’t have organizing, is what I feel. We have a lot of institutions and spaces where people can come and be comfortable and live and learn and work. But we need to be able to utilize every single aspect of our community to apply pressure. I think it’s as simple as, you know, when a flier comes around for a protest or a press conference and, you know, 500 people in the group chat each say, I’m just one person.
If I can’t make it, I’m busy. If I don’t go, it’s going to be fine. And, you know, 500 people say the same thing, and that makes a huge difference, right? The coverage of a 500-person protest, the media coverage and the narrative uplifting is so different than the coverage of like, oh, you know, ten people showed up, which again, shout out to the ten people.
And that’s not to diminish their work, but all of our work becomes better if we are doing it together in organizing and in organizations. So I would say the number one thing is joining organizations that are doing the work that you are aligned with, not trying to do this on your own, although all of us have our own circles of influence and our ability to make change with just, you know, the people that we know and the people that we can influence, we can do better if we join different organizations.
When I was an undergrad, I was part of SJP, UT Dallas, and actually I was really privileged to be joining the org when Sarah Abdelkader was the president, who was the daughter of Abdelkader. You know, doing Palestine work on my own would have been so different than doing it, you know, under the kind of tutelage of Sarah, who was so deeply impacted and taught me so much about the Holy Land Foundation case and what that impact was to her.
And that was part of what pivoted me from being an engineer. By the way, I don’t think we talked about this, but yeah, I was a biomedical engineer for a year and a half. Those were horrendous times.
I switched out halfway through and became interdisciplinary studies because I was like, I just want to graduate. I’m going to law school. The shift there, a lot of it was from being in organizations and being in community with people and seeing what the need was and what the impact was of these of anti Palestinian anti-Muslim sentiment was on our community and realizing, you know, even if I’m the the best engineer possible, I don’t feel like I’m doing within my own skill set what, what will benefit the community. And so it’s kind of assessing yourself and how you can plug into the community as a whole.
30:00 Prompt 1: Have Muslims done enough? Where and why are we lacking?
Mustafa Syed: All right. So now we want to switch gears and ask you guys. We want to get to our first prompt for today. So if you have something to write with that’s ideal, or write on your phone or something, I think Anzar might have some paper in the back. I think it’s over there on the counter in the box. There’s some paper in there as well.
So we want to ask you guys. So now with all of this context that we’re talking about with eyes and, you know, immigration and supporting, you know, people in detention have Muslims. Have we done enough in this space? And if not, then where and why are we lacking?
Let’s take five minutes, and you guys can write down your thoughts, and then, inshallah, we’ll discuss with the people around you, and then we’ll circle back. All right?
Audience Member #1: I think there’s definitely a culture of overwhelm and that oppression relies on us feeling overwhelmed and overburdened so that we just do nothing. The answer to that is twofold. The first is that doing something, even if you don’t think it’s going to tackle the entire system of oppression, is better than doing nothing because you feel overwhelmed by it.
Allah is going to hold us accountable on the day of judgment for our actions and for our intentions and not for the outcomes. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind when you’re thinking about how to go about this work. Is that going back to what Yara was saying, that, you know, it’s not about having the instant outcome or saying that, you know, we’ve we’ve we’ve freed Palestine, and we’ve ended ICE and we’ve, you know, liberated people from the prison industrial complex.
Like, there’s so many different issues, but at their core, they’re all kind of the same. If you really like map these issues, they’re the same groups behind a lot of them, you know. And so one is acknowledging that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed because that’s part of how the system is designed to make us feel, even the way our timelines just bombard us with information; we get to the point where we’re just like, okay, I need to just, you know, disassociate, disconnect.
That’s okay to feel that way, but just know that you need to power through that because that’s part of how the system continues to get complacency out of you. But two, knowing that at the end of the day, there’s really just like a few key structures holding all of this together, right?
That Zionism, white supremacy, capitalism, they’re all. I mean, you could probably, like, fit all the people responsible in this room. If you really wanted to go to the root of it of who’s behind the various sentiments, I would say, or who’s fueling it the most.
And so there are ways that, if we organize ourselves, we can tackle it. I don’t think the overwhelm comes from wanting to do it by yourself, I think, and so doing it within a larger organization, people who have also been going at it for years against the same type of systems, the same types of entities. For example, one thing that’s crippling Zionism is an effective boycott.
Companies are tripping over themselves to say that, you know, we don’t have any, you know, affiliation with Zionist entities- not all of them, not the ones that we really need, like Caterpillar, and the ones that we need to specifically stop harming the Palestinian community. But one person boycotting these organized themselves is not going to be enough; we need to get us organized together.
You realize that a lot of these are, once you kind of hit the main targets, I guess, with whatever the action is- boycotting, campaigning, etc.- the lesser companies or the lesser partners in the evil kind of start dispersing on their own. So I feel like maybe just envisioning for ourselves, envisioning and truly believing that, like, in our lifetime, we can’t see this change. This is not just something that we’re doing for future generations, but like, I’m going to take my kids to a free Palestine and show them. Like, keeping that in mind too, I think would help with the atmosphere of overwhelm.
34:45 The Relevance of the Holy Land Foundation Case
Mustafa Syed: So in the context of, I guess right now. Right. Like we’re talking about, okay, maybe we haven’t done enough, you know, we need to get organized, but I guess stepping a little bit back. So now we see ICE. You know, they’re kidnapping people in the street there. You know, they’re killing people in the streets.
People’s lives are being changed, and they don’t even know what’s going on. We have people getting deported to random countries that they’re not even from. From your perspective as an attorney in this space, can you tell us a little bit of what you’ve seen?
Noor Wadi: So there’s I, I’ve been privileged to be able to work on cases both from a legal capacity and also just from, like, an organizing capacity and so, you know, we talked about one case and we didn’t talk about the details of it, though, but essentially, the Holy Land Foundation convictions are being weaponized against our community as we speak. I remember once immigration allegations included the fact that he volunteered for an HLS fundraiser in 1997. Like that is a line in the decision. And the judge read that and said, yep, yep, yep, that sounds like material support to me. And you know that he was the clown at a kid’s fair. Like, it’s essentially, like, completely ridiculous.
You see that aspect of it then Yakub’s case, are people familiar with that case? We had a press conference for him this morning. Actually, the immigration judge, equally ridiculous in that case, has essentially said that because Yakub used his social media to platform the cases of the Holy Land Foundation five, among other cases.
But that was one of the cases that was cited in the judge’s decision that he calls them political prisoners. But it’s not because he believes that they’re innocent. It’s because he agrees with what they did. It’s essentially the judge’s opinion, which, first of all, from a legal perspective, is First Amendment.
I can believe and think and say whatever I want. That’s all protected speech. There’s no allegation even, you know, I’m not one that connected to him directly because of his volunteer efforts here with the club. It’s even more egregious.
Um, he’s doing the work that we’re doing here. That kind of stuff is why he’s been in custody for six months. It’s outrageous to see. But we know that, you know, he’s still pending on the federal side, the immigration judge. We knew that. It was like I told you guys earlier: it’s a DHS employee.
He’s going to fall in line with his employer, but we’re still waiting to hear on the habeas and hopeful that the judge is going to see through that. I’m not part of the habeas in that case. But so when I say we, I mean like the campaign, the community, etc., I even, you know, in some cases that folks haven’t heard about Yakub has kind of opened like an immigration clinic within the ICE detention facility. May Allah reward him. I mean, he is in the same position as these people, and he’s sitting every day thinking, how do I help my brothers in detention with me?
As if to put him there just so that he can, like, go through their cases and help connect them with different attorneys. Like that is the level, first of all, of of service to others that we need to all be in to, to have a change in our community that even from from the depths of Ice detention he’s referring clients to maybe like, not this guy is Palestinian, he’s been in custody for two years and he doesn’t speak English and need somebody to help him out.
And, you know, I helped that guy file a habeas. And we had our first hearing. And, you know, the judge hasn’t ruled yet, but he does seem to be kind of on our side that with what’s going on overseas right now with Israel escalating the conflict, there’s no chance that they’re going to deport this guy.
And he’s been in custody since July. It’ll be two years. Like he entered ICE custody when he was 25 years old, and he’s 27 now. That’s insane. That’s the whole that’s ICE detention was never meant to hold people for that long. I’m not in terms of why they built it, but legally the concepts there’s so much case law preventing people from being detained indefinitely. And ICE’s position on that guy is, well, you know, we can’t deport him right now due to the current situation in the Middle East.
But we’re, you know, we’re taking our best efforts. And I’m like, judge, they’re saying they’re going to hold them until there’s peace in the Middle East. Like, what’s it like? Can we be honest? Yeah, right. The day of Judgment. I think that’s crazy. So we’re waiting to hear back on that case.
But it’s just case by case. The facts are insane. And I think that, you know, not every case, unfortunately, can have a full campaign where people talk about it. But we do need to talk about these individuals and make them feel known and heard. And I think tomorrow, even there’s a political prisoner event here at MAS, and even tonight there’s an SJP town hall.
Going to those spaces, I think there’s going to be like letter-writing opportunities. Just making those people feel seen is a small thing that we can do within our communities to ensure that the government doesn’t succeed in what they want to do, which is just to erase people from the fabric of our nation.
43:02 How to Contextualize the Efforts
Mustafa Syed: So how do we contextualize now? We talked a little bit about some of the efforts, but maybe how do we contextualize the lack of effort from a lot of Muslims? Like I might argue that the majority of. You know that there aren’t any sheikhs, but the majority of you maybe haven’t even really, you know, dedicated time talking about ICE even by name or like really bringing up a lot of these cases.
So how do we kind of contextualize all of this when, I guess, people who are supposed to be religious leadership and whatnot or community leaders are not really giving this? I guess putting this at the front of mind, like maybe it should be.
Noor Wadi: Yeah. One of the brothers nailed this specifically when he said that we are, as a community, still buying into that model minority myth. And I think that that is what we see at the top levels in the US that don’t mention these issues and in the the day to day Islamic mosque programing that don’t mention these issues that we have bought into this idea that if we just do our best, don’t bother anybody, you know, focus on our, our work and on our kids and raising good, healthy, happy families that this is not going to touch us.
And unfortunately, we’re slowly, as a community, coming to terms with the fact that that’s not going to protect us, and appealing to power is also not going to protect us, which is a lot of what people have pivoted to. Instead of organizing ourselves, maybe if we donate more to Governor Abbott’s campaign, maybe then he’ll stop doing this to us, you know, like, you laugh. But this is, I mean, this is the ideology that people are pivoting to instead of thinking first of all, the idea from the current administration.
Allah SWT is not going to change our situation until we start changing ourselves. And part of that is making ourselves feel uncomfortable, making ourselves. One of the brothers mentioned here that, like, we’re not working as hard as we can be, and we are very accustomed as a muslim community to the privileged life that we have built.
Our parents worked hard for that, so I’m not discounting that, you know, I know our parents left their home countries because they wanted to have this life for us here. But now it’s our turn to say, okay, Alhamdulillah, we’ve been able to live in this privilege and comfort, and we need to do more now to ensure that future generations continue to have the same rights that we enjoyed up until a point, I would say.
45:46 Should we migrate?
Mustafa Syed: So in the spirit of that. And, you know, I guess maybe breaking comfort a little bit in one of our Ramadan sessions that we had with Imam Asif, we discussed whether or not Muslims should make hijrah. You know, should we as Muslims migrate to Muslim-majority countries? What’s your take on that?
Noor Wadi: I hate that idea.
Listen, I mean, if we had a free Palestine, then that’s different. You know, we all migrate there and try and live next to Al-Aqsa. And that would be a beautiful future. I mean, I mean, but to leave because things feel uncomfortable. I think that’s different. I mean, first of all, the caveat being if you personally, you and your family are at risk, you know, whether it’s ICE detention or anything like that, um, physically, your well-being is at risk, then yes.
You know, you need to put that first and do what you can from another country to keep yourself safe. But if you’re thinking about that, just because, oh, I, you know, I would love to live somewhere where McDonald’s chicken nuggets are halal, like, that’s not what life is about. Like, that’s not what Allah SWT put us on this earth for? We’re not, you know, we’re not supposed to just be comfortable. A lot of us have the privilege as American citizens to push harder than our green card-holding brothers, our DACA recipient brothers and sisters. Also, we got to think about, like, our, our convert Muslim community.
Yakub himself converted three years ago. You know, I mean, if we say, oh, we’re just going to go back to the motherland. What is it going to ask of us on the Day of Judgment about what we did to help the people who this is? This is their homeland. This is where they are from. You know, this is our Muslim community. So I think that, um, in the spirit of hijrah, the idea I think you take that idea and instead of saying, I’m going to move somewhere to another country, you say, I’m going to do what the Prophet SAW did and build power within the Muslim community before reaching out to build coalitions and connections outside of the Muslim community.
I think that we need to have a hijrah mentality where we build ourselves mentally into a Medina infrastructure, where we are able to take care of ourselves and engage politically and engage civically with a strong, mobilized base. And then, you know, start working with other groups to make the change that we want to see for the entire community.
46:08 How do we liberate ourselves and our communities?
Mustafa Syed: And building where we are. You know, I think one thing we even talked about offline a little bit was, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work with Newton and Oak Cliff in the Oak Cliff Empowerment Center. So, you know, you mentioned like, where are they going to go? You know, like that’s where they’re from.
You know, they’re not going to migrate. I’m not going to name any countries, but, you know. You talked about working with others, so I think one question I wanted to ask is just how do we, I guess, create this before our last prompt? How do we liberate ourselves and our communities and work with others to do that?
Because I think, you know, at the end of the day, we are still like 1% of us. Maybe, you know, our like the way our name comes up in the news and in politics and all that. It’s, you know, it seems like we’re a lot more. But at the end of the day, like on paper, we are like 1% of the country. So how do we, I guess, organize in a way with others that makes a difference?
Noor Wadi: So first come to the table educated, and don’t expect the communities that have been impacted by this to do the work of educating us. As I mentioned with the ICE example, you know, I think the Muslim community is starting to wake up to the idea that ICE has always been functioning in the way that it’s functioning against the Muslim community now.
I’m sure the Latino community is like. Good morning. Like. Yes, we’ve known that. Right. And so, you know, it’s not too late to join those coalitions. And kind of acknowledge that, hey, we haven’t been in this space and we want to support, but do the work in educating yourself in that process.
And if that means coming out to events like this, that’s awesome. Reading, going to law school, I’m always going to plug that, always going to plug that, just doing what you can within your own space.
If you’re not leaning towards law, there’s other spaces too. I was going to mention that I had a good friend of mine from undergrad who is a doctor, and she could have just been, you know, I’m going to focus on being the best emergency medical doctor in Dallas, and this is what I’m going to do.
But when things started, the genocide began in Gaza. She’s going for her third trip next week to use the skills that she has to help people directly. She’s not a lawyer. She’s she is part of advocating. But you don’t have to have a specific activist skill set to do things that serve the community.
48:48 Prompt 2: How can you use the skills you’ve been blessed with to contribute to something beyond yourselves?
Mustafa Syed: So in that spirit, we’ll head to our second and final prompt. We have a few things that we’re going to talk about right after. But our second prompt is: what’s next? You know, in the in we talked a little bit about, you know, like Yakub and you know, and, her physician friend and people doing things in their sphere of influence wherever they are, doing things in their sphere of influence.
So within your sphere of influence and the skills that you have been blessed with, what’s something that you can do to become more connected to the community and contributing to something beyond just yourself, so that you know you can be proud of that thing on the day of judgment. So we want to have you guys talk about that for like two minutes.
You have one minute to talk to each other about what are people’s rights when they see someone being detained by ICE or, you know, I guess, how can communities really, like, protect themselves if because as much as we hope it doesn’t happen, it is a very real possibility that, you know, we have ICE showing up in masjid, like, what do we do?
Noor Wadi: Yep. Yeah. Speedrun. No, you’re right. Session five minutes. No one was saying that the number one thing that our massages can be doing to protect us is making a positive stance or express position on. We will not allow ICE to enter our masjid without a warrant, and that also requires the masjid board and staff to understand what an ICE warrant is and isn’t, because a typical ICE warrant does not grant them access to the space.
And so just having a piece of paper that says, oh, a notice of warrant and deportation is not enough for them to enter; they need to have a masjid board and security that know what an actual judicial warrant looks like in order to know. Oh, okay, I have to grant this person entry. So that’s huge.
That’s one that needs to have been implemented yesterday. I mean, we could do a full no year right session if we could. Right now we have salon for like five minutes. I will say I think there are two perspectives to think of. One is if you are the person who is being detained, and another is if it’s your loved one and you’re looking out for them.
If you are the person, I would say, first of all, if you think you might be at risk, you just know, like, hey, my status. For example, I’m on DACA status, and we know that Trump is like making DACA exclusions a priority right now. Already have attorneys that you’ve consulted with. And that was something that Yakub had done.
When he was arrested, he already had an attorney who knew his A number and had a general basic understanding of what was going on in the case so that they could quickly pass it off to somebody who practiced in Georgia where he was, and that helped with getting him representation faster.
So kind of having an attorney on standby, I guess, so to speak. But again, then if you’re arrested out of the blue, do not sign anything without an attorney present. You don’t. It’s not like criminal where you have a Sixth Amendment right to have an attorney with you. But you can insist they don’t have to provide one for you, but you can insist that, hey, I want an attorney, so I’m not going to talk to you guys. I’m not going to sign anything. They’ll just refuse to sign on everything because.
So when Yakub got arrested, Mustafa, Carol, and a few others went to the ICE facility. And they will not let you in. Like I squeezed my card with one of the really aggressive officers. And I was like, I, I get that you’re not going to let me see him, but give him this so he at least has a number to call. Another thing to know is that even if you have an attorney on standby and you have somebody looking out for you, you’re until you’re designated to your final facility, which could take up to 48 hours.
You could just be kind of in this limbo, sitting at the Dallas ICE Processing Center and not knowing what’s next. So that and then that’s what pivots to your loved ones. Keeping an eye on the ICE detainee locator. Do you guys know how to find that online? You literally just type in ICE detainee locator.
And if you know a person’s number and their country of birth, you can search and find which facility they’re at. If they don’t show up on the system, but, you know, they’re arrested, that means they haven’t been designated yet. So you just keep checking it over and over and over again until you’re able to see what facility they’re at.
And from there, you can set up their commissary. You can set up the worst app in the world, which is the what was it called? The messaging app, where they take tens of hundreds of dollars from you so that you can send messages to your loved one at a cost of $0.70 per message. Oh, they made so much money off of the little one.
Like, it’s actually really sick. Like it’s a private corporation. That is housing him. And then a private corporation that makes money off of being able to call and text him. But those are all things that you, you know, you do because it makes that person feel seen and connected and not isolated, which is part of what the system wants.
Then having either the standby attorney reach out to somebody who can take the full-on case or going through your list and getting someone to take the case is going to be really important. Starting to collect money for bond, because although unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of people being denied bond.
That’s not always the case. You should always shoot your shot for bond, even if you feel like, oh, ultimately, they’re not going to let him out. Bonds for the court. I want to say the bond was set at, like, $100,000. Right. Am I one? It was something insane. The community pulled it together, but.
Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a lot of different things. And being able to sum it all up in the three minutes.
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