November 20, 2025
MARWAN MAROUF: THE CLOSING ARGUMENT THAT WAS NEVER GIVEN
By: Marium Uddin
This is dedicated to Marwan, and to all our political prisoners including Yaakub and Sami and those whose names we know and all those whose names we never knew; and all those in Palestine – the ones whose makeshift tents upon displacement several times over are flooded in Gaza due to heavy rains; Awdah Hathleen; the little boy whose eyeball was dangling out of its socket after he was shot in the face on his way to school; and the victims of brutal and unforgivable torture at Sde Temain and every black site prison where corrupt politicians shamelessly step on their bodies and with glee break their thumbs and their jaws.
Your Honor, may it please the court.
Every good storybook, every movie, every courtroom drama has a boogeyman.
For Muslim Americans and Palestinian Americans, it has always been, invariably, without fail, the terrorism boogeyman. The government’s playbook has grown tiresome: HLF every time. It has reached back over 20 years to summon the boogeyman in this courtroom drama. 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, 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 U.S. The irony of that narrative is this – the narrative being that those who threw stones against the most invincible armies with their tanks and their guns and their psychological warfare, perfected in every conceivably inhumane way, made it impossible for good people to feed hungry children.
The boogeyman is a complicated guy – there is a whole architecture around him – within the false narrative are embedded layers of other false narratives. The narrative requires adherence to the notion that there can be no resistance fighters, no freedom fighters, in the face of inhumane occupation and settler violence designed to humiliate and break. There can be no humanitarian work to defend a people who do not have the right to even their own rainwater; such civil society work is naturally “terrorism-adjacent.” When the remnants of that echo in the handiwork of preventing crutches, cancer meds, maternity kits, water purification tablets and dates – under the banner of national security dual-use bans – as to any who aligns against the narrative and dare speak out, or like Marwan, who merely look like they might have possibly ever so lightly given the narrative a passing thought with a donation to an orphan – what better way to keep the boogeyman strong than to discredit them by deporting them all?
The government’s same tired playbook is to tell you that those fighters – those “terrorists” – possessed the reach to corrupt American nonprofit work, humanitarian giving, and the honest labor of men like Marwan – of Marwan himself! They made it impossible – illegal – to stop prison rape, the stealing of sheep, the burning down of olive trees, the indignity of hunger – by making a donation. It’s a narrative so inverted that human decency itself is recast as danger. Today’s case is as much about those boogeymen as it is about lawfare: the use of legal systems and institutions to affect foreign and domestic affairs, and it only works if you pre-accept the notion that a Palestinian man’s very existence is suspicious. The continued invocation by the government of terrorism is lazy and it’s formulaic.
This case today before you should have never been about relitigating the HLF. But the government insisted on centering it there. And, therefore, I have to urge you to first – in the first instance – be guided by common sense.
Again and again, if you must, I ask that you examine the (testimony and documentary submissions regarding the) HLF trial and recognize that HRW decried it as one of the most profound miscarriages of justice in modern times. It was a failure of legal redress and a moral bankruptcy of our courts that resulted in the deprivation of liberty for those whose hands were clean. It is the story of innocent men locked up and never vindicated. Don’t allow a false legacy to taint your judgment today. Don’t allow it to continue its poisonous effects on a righteous, lawful decision of integrity and dictate the fate of a man whose life bears no resemblance to the allegations the government so desperately wants you to import. Don’t compound error upon error and stack one injustice upon another.
And, even if you were to believe that, in fact, Ghassan Elashi and his comrades were guilty as charged and received the hefty sentences they deserved, then picture your own Sunday afternoon barbeques. Family, laughter, the smoky smell of meats on the grill. Are the high-level officers of the nonprofit casually and recklessly discussing the intricacies of their illegal operations, funding the boogeymen abroad, among their wives and children, their volunteers, neighbors, and friends? Between the lemonade pitcher and the potato salad? Among billowing yellow skirts due to the summer breeze and sweet children playing tag and running through sprinklers? Right there? Right then? In broad daylight? And, if criminal conspiracy conversation were not held at the BBQ but instead at secret covert meetings after the guests had left – what shred of evidence do we have that Marwan was at those meetings? What single shred of evidence – not speculation but Evidence – do we have of his willful and meaningful participation? Would you impute what you know and hold sacred in legal knowledge on a sensitive case to your legal assistant’s – who you share a 9-5 work life with – husband’s brother’s wife? And, those are the six degrees of separation we are talking about, right? Marwan’s wife’s sister’s husband. If not your legal assistant, your wife’s sister’s husband? Would he have knowledge of and access to what you decide in the sanctuary of your chambers? That is, in fact, the reach the government demands here. That is the connective tissue on which they hang the full weight of their accusations: Marwan’s wife’s sister’s husband. Even more remote than a brother-in-law. Think about that. Think about that supposed pipeline of “knowledge.” It’s a flimsy bridge they’re asking you to cross to build a finding that would destroy a man’s life.
And, next, your Honor, I ask that your legal acumen and privilege be guided by the light of humane, compassionate, and well-reasoned exercise of discretion. Minus the specter of terrorism, absent this dirty, smudged fingerprint of a supposed boogeyman, you have a beautiful case of a beautiful man who unquestionably warrants a beautiful grant of relief.
I want to speak frankly to yet another elephant boogeyman in the room: your hands-tied-behind-your-back. EOIR is notoriously known for restricting the judicial independence of its corpus. Under this administration – built on a campaign promise of executing the largest mass deportation in history – the DOJ has issued sweeping precedent, precedent that represents a radical departure from decades of sound, legal practice. The DOJ, in conjunction with the DOS and DHS, serves up on a platter to this administration a roundup of 3000 folks per day to process them out of this country like inventory – people on planes – daily flights – like common avocados on a ship. Mandatory detention is broader than it has ever been. Grants are circumscribed by internal policy. In fact, rather than uphold the Constitution, we now sidestep it and EO, policymake, and memo around it to get what we want.
Are all the federal judges and advocates and scholars and human rights defenders and interfaith leaders who stand against this, saying the system is broken, wrong? You’re in the throes of immigration law being politicized and weaponized. People like Marwan, with no advocates in the halls of power, stand in the crossfires as easy targets and predictable, if not inevitable, casualties. I’m asking you to stand against that machine and be grounded in and driven by your principles, your conscience, and your fidelity to the law – not to metrics.
It has been said that the unintended consequences of keeping score are the subject of Goodhart’s Law, the principle articulated by British economist Charles Goodhart, who observed that, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Though Goodhart was writing about monetary policy, the principle explains how people alter behavior to optimize for a metric, rather than for the underlying goal the metric is supposed to represent. That principle can be extended to where we stand in the law today.
Let’s not fool ourselves: we are keeping score and there are unintended consequences. We are living inside Goodhart’s Law. If the principle is reduced to a person, and that person is Marwan, then when the measure of Marwan as a man is a function of being targeted by the government, the measure ceases to be a good measure. If the principle is expanded to include the broad and seemingly limitless swath of those affected by this government’s immigration policies – whether 3000 pickups per day or restricted authority on issues like bond and grants – then the measure of who we are and how we respond ceases to be a good measure unless we are relying on our intellect and powers of discernment. I urge you to rely on those today.
What of the better angels of our nature? Minus a grant of relief, they did not show up today. They are on planes departing this country every day as this administration, via ICE, effectuates removals at scale. This is a stain we can never recover from. This is a wound that does not heal with the next election or the next memo. Even if there were a change in administration, the ripple effects are the buildings of Gaza that have been reduced to rubble, entire neighborhoods and families decimated: the damage is so extensive, the debris is so much, it will take years – decades – to undo. This is what happens when systems collapse – when care, caution and humanity are left on the side of the road like dead animals. Roadkill. What we do today can be irreversible and irreparable. What due process in the future for those deprived of due process today? Would we do a global scan to identify those damaged and try to retrieve them, bring them back into the fold of a crippled courtroom system, and afford or accord them their rights – the rights we surrender today? What is stripped today cannot be restored tomorrow.
One day, we will all claim to have always been against this. Let that day be today. You exist to protect him. Your appointment to your seat of honor means something today. Let the record reflect that on this day, in this courtroom, justice was not another casualty. Let the legacy of this moment be courage, not complicity. Let Marwan walk out of Bluebonnet not as a measure, not as a target, not as a Palestinian, but as an American. A deserving American. A better angel of America.
