When I saw Marwan Marouf’s face plastered on my Instagram feed, under bright red letters announcing he’d been arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the first thing I remembered was his distinctive, gentle voice.
For nearly three decades, Brother Marwan, as we know him, has been a constant presence in our community. Long before the Dallas area attracted thousands of Muslims and high-profile religious leaders, we grew up in small congregations, and people like Marouf led prayers and delivered short sermons to a few-dozen families now and then. He’d arrived in the city in the ’90s as a student, and he later worked as an engineer at the same company as my dad and some of my friends’ parents.
Once, in high school, during late evening Ramadan prayers, I fell asleep while he was giving a lecture, lulled into a sense of peaceful drowsiness. In the women’s section of the mosque, there was a running joke that the mics weren’t strong enough to amplify Marouf’s soft-spoken delivery. I remember being annoyed that I had missed most of his sermon, as he’d been coming around to our masjid less frequently, since there were dozens of them now to rotate between. His sermons were almost always uplifting reminders about how to live more compassionately and generously at a time when it felt like both these forces were dwindling in our society.
Marouf, who is Palestinian, had been seeking permanent legal status since 2012 after receiving student and work visas, according to his lawyers in a press release, but he was first denied a green card in 2020. On September 22, ICE informed him he was denied again, his lawyers say, based on a decades-old claim that Marouf—through his support for the Palestinian-led charity the Holy Land Foundation—had supported terrorist activities. ICE arrested him that day, and he’s since been detained at the notorious Bluebonnet detention facility some 200 miles away from home. The Muslim Legal Fund for America (MLFA), which is handling his case, declined to comment for this story as he awaits a bond hearing, but the group has said that Marouf’s arrest and detention are “a direct affront to the due process protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”
In North Texas, where I grew up, Marouf is best known in the community for his work with the Muslim American Society of Dallas, supporting youth programming. He sponsored a Boy Scouts troop, led volunteer initiatives, and worked with programs for refugees as well. During the pandemic, he drove around Dallas and its sprawling suburbs delivering meals and supplies to people who needed extra help. Last year, he was recognized by the City of Richardson, one of the inner-ring suburbs, for his community service.
On social media, the Muslim American Society quickly started collecting stories in his support, with the hashtag #BecauseOfMarwan. Many people affectionately called him Amo, the Arabic word for uncle, recalling his humble nature and the small ways he would make people smile—never getting mad at kids running amok at the center; making volunteers feel proud of the tasks they were assigned; and constantly working in the background to make everything run smoothly. He never sought the spotlight, but everyone who’s been in town long enough knows the name Marwan Marouf.
“When I moved to Dallas with my family, Amo Marwan and his family really helped us feel like we’d lived here our whole lives,” said Noor Wadi, a community organizer who’s been supporting public outreach efforts for his case. “When … we’re at civic events, it feels empty without Amo Marwan. But we have hope that he will come back home. We’re going to apply pressure from every single angle.”
The Holy Land Foundation case, which the government tenuously tied Marouf to, was a major milestone in the U.S. government’s targeting of Muslims and Palestinians. The W. Bush administration designated the foundation a terrorist organization in 2001, saying that it had secretly sent funds to Hamas. The charity, which had provided food and medical aid and supported other aid programs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, was at that point the largest Muslim-led charity in the United States. It distributed funds to reputable organizations in Palestine that also received funds from the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the European Commission.
In what many observers, including the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, consider a sham trial, the five leaders of the charity were convicted and sent to prison. Their sentences ranged from 15 to 65 years. The convictions relied on testimony from anonymous witnesses from the Israeli military and evidence gathered from government wiretaps of the charity’s leaders. Former Treasury Department officials later admitted that Muslim-run charities were an “easy, soft target” in the early years of the War on Terror.
According to Marouf’s legal team, he was transparent about his time volunteering with the foundation, when they had fundraisers locally, when immigration officials questioned him about it during his green card application process. And his donations and volunteer work pre-dated the Bush administration’s questionable terror designation anyway.
“This volunteer work included ordering pizza and hiring a clown to entertain children while their parents attended [foundation] fundraising events,” MLFA said. “Marwan’s donations included sponsorship of an orphan in Palestine. And yet, some thirty years later, the government still chooses to wrongfully penalize Marwan for these ordinary acts of charity—acts which he considers obligatory to his faith.”
Wadi said that the case could raise fears among the community about being targeted for similar donations or civic engagement. The accusations made 20 years ago against the Holy Land Foundation, and other Islamic charities, are similar to the accusations that Israel has recently leveled against the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, for example. In 2024, the Biden administration froze funding to the humanitarian organization after Israel accused some of its staff of participating in terrorist acts.
What’s different now, Wadi said, is that the general public isn’t blindly accepting such claims about Muslims in their communities, especially after watching what a United Nations commission and a growing number of scholars have declared a genocide in Gaza, along with the blatant targeting of Palestinian student activists like Mahmoud Khalil. “People from all walks of life are saying, ‘That’s enough.’”
Imam Omar Suleiman, a well-known Dallas preacher, said that Marouf’s arrest was particularly shocking as the Trump administration has targeted Palestinians involved in demonstrations. “His arrest makes it apparent that the administration is now interested in targeting any Palestinian immigrant, whether they voice their opinions or simply serve quietly within their communities,” Suleiman said in an email.
So far in Dallas, the community has turned out for Marouf. At a packed community gathering the day after his arrest, Suleiman told the gathered crowd not to despair. “This is not a funeral, this is not us bidding farewell to someone,” he said. “The heart of our community, the pillar of our community, has been taken away from us, and we can’t rest, nor can we accept that this is the way this is going to go.”
He urged the crowd to continue advocating not just for Marouf but for the other detainees who have been unjustly held by ICE—like Leeqa Kordia, a 32-year-old Palestinian woman from New Jersey who has also been held at a North Texas detention center. “Marwan would be the first person to tell you to use his case, and what’s happened to him, to shine a light on people who share his plight,” Suleiman said. “If any one of you were in his situation, he would run around the world to make sure you got the support you needed.”
