What LaSalle County Voted On, and What It Still Needs to Prove

On October 8, the LaSalle County Board voted 13 to 12 to adopt a resolution titled “Reaffirming the Supremacy of the United States Constitution and the Illinois Constitution, and Prohibiting the Application of Foreign or Religious Law in LaSalle County Proceedings” (LaSalle County agenda, Oct. 8, 2026).

The title never mentions Sharia. The text does, again and again, and one sentence states:

“the LaSalle County Board denounces Sharia law in all forms and opposes any implementation of Sharia law in the United States, the State of Illinois and LaSalle County” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

The vote followed four months of fighting over a proposal to turn the shuttered Fox River Resort near Sheridan into a faith-centered community for Muslim families. The fight packed board meetings, drew in a state senator, and brought a Chicago civil-rights group demanding the censure of a board member.

The title states a principle every American should affirm without hesitation. The U.S. Constitution is supreme. One law governs everyone. No religious code, foreign court, or private tribunal outranks an American citizen’s rights. But the body of the resolution is something different.

The Property and the Promise

The Fox River Resort is located on about 165 acres outside Sheridan and includes 332 units, an indoor waterpark, a golf course, and a lake. It closed in October 2025 (Shaw Local, Oct. 14, 2026).

Vairt Inc., a Pennsylvania company led by Jamil Ahmed Sukhera, describes itself as a provider of halal, or Sharia-compliant, real estate investment. Sukhera incorporated it in June 2022. On April 22, 2026, it signed an agreement to buy the resort for $6.5 million (Fox River Resort Club v. Vairt Inc., N.D. Ill. No. 1:26-cv-08321). Under the V Resort Living brand, it then marketed apartments, fractional ownership, a gated, faith-centered community, halal dining, a mosque, an on-site school, and Musharakah co-ownership, a partnership arrangement that lets Muslim buyers own property without paying interest (Yorkville Herald, July 23, 2026; WSPY, July 13, 2026).

The marketing ran well ahead of the promoters’ ability to produce. At the June 8 board meeting, Land Use Director Brian Gift pointed out:

“While it appears from the media that redevelopment has been approved, it has not been approved through the County.”

The sale had not closed. Long-term residential use would require a zoning hearing, public notice, and County Board approval (LaSalle County Board minutes, June 8, 2026).

On July 6, the sellers, Fox River Resort Club and Silverleaf Resorts, LLC, sued. They allege that they objected in writing on June 4 to unauthorized advertising and a planned June 7 open house; that Sukhera announced on LinkedIn that Vairt had acquired a property it did not own; and that the parties signed a mutual termination on June 18, which Vairt later tried to undo (Yorkville Herald, July 23, 2026). Vairt moved the case to federal court in Chicago and asked the judge to send the dispute to private arbitration. Both requests remain under advisement (U.S. District Court docket via Justia).

The Buyer

Vairt sells fractional shares, starting at $25,000, in hotels and homes it says it holds in separate LLCs. Its website lists 20 offerings, from Dubai apartments to hotels in Iowa, Kansas, West Virginia, and Peoria, with projected returns as high as 152 percent (Vairt). A search of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database turns up no filing under Vairt’s name, and the offering pages cite no registration or exemption.

As of mid-October, Vairt still listed V Resort Living as a live $16.5 million offering, “10% invested,” though the contract price was $6.5 million and the sellers say the deal ended in June. Its figures, $3 million to acquire and $13.5 million to rehab, match Vairt’s listing for a Peoria hotel to the dollar.

Sukhera has claimed $2.5 billion under management and properties worth about $100 million each, “bought in cash” (National Security Threat: Pakistani Imam Converts 165-Acre Illinois Holiday Inn Into Muslim City RAIR Foundation, June 10, 2026). Vairt’s earnest money on the $6.5 million Fox River purchase was $784,825. The escrow agent reported that it came from “three different sources” and would not release it without written direction from all of them. The title company also wanted proof of who had authority to sign for Vairt, and Vairt produced its 2022 articles of incorporation. The sale never closed.

On June 24, with the $784,825 still in escrow, Sukhera wrote that the delay had “materially impacted” Vairt’s ability to “deploy capital,” “satisfy financing requirements,” and “conduct its ordinary business operations.” He tied the harm to a court-supervised sale of a Hilton hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, which closed that day (Fox River Resort Club v. Vairt Inc., Dkt. 9-8, 9-9, 14-7).

That $784,825 is about three-hundredths of one percent of $2.5 billion. A real estate company that size would not have its operations hobbled by losing access to it for six days. Assets under management belong to investors, not to the company, so a firm can manage a great deal and hold little cash of its own. But Sukhera also said Vairt buys $100 million properties in cash, yet it got earnest money for a $6.5 million resort from three different sources. Both accounts cannot be true.

A developer sold a vision for a property it did not own, to Muslim families and investors, for a use the county had never approved. That alone is a legitimate public concern, and it has nothing to do with anyone’s religion. Investors deserve to know what they are buying. Neighbors deserve to know what is coming. Sellers deserve to control their own property.

The neighbors made that case on October 8. A resident of Norway, the hamlet where the resort sits, told the board that a community of about 100 people was being asked to grow 20 to 30 times overnight. She described lift-station failures that sent sewage into ditches, creeks, and the Fox River when only a few hundred guests were staying; a one-exit road that ice jams flood in winter; and permits that have barred residential use since 1997. Then she added:

“Had it been a family from this particular faith that bought a home in our community, they would have been welcomed. Had any other residential compound been proposed, it would have been fought the same way” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

State Senator Sue Rezin (R-Morris) pressed infrastructure and security questions, including the resort’s proximity to the LaSalle Clean Energy Center and a National Guard training center (Shaw Local, July 10, 2026). Roads, water, sewer, and emergency response are significant concerns. They apply to every developer, of every faith.

Where “Sharia” Entered the Record

County Board member James Reid (R-Sandwich) introduced the term into the local record. At the June 8 meeting, right after Gift’s report, Reid told the board that “[t]he original pamphlet that went out very clearly stated that this would be a gated fenced community operated under strict Sharia law.” He said he worried county law enforcement would be called to the property “and not allowed through the gate.”

He drew on his three years in the Middle East:

“I have seen people stoned to death. I have seen women beaten in the street just for being women. And I will not allow this in this county” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, June 8, 2026).

That pamphlet is the single most important document in this controversy. If it says what Reid says it says, it changes the story. If it says something narrower, such as Sharia-compliant financing, it changes the story in the other direction.

Four months later, it has not surfaced in any public record I have been able to locate. It is not in the federal court filings I reviewed. The sellers’ June 4 letter objects to Vairt’s “advertisements” for the open house without attaching them, and neither side’s filings use the word “Sharia.” Vairt’s own arbitration complaint describes “a resort style residential and hospitality community” and says it canceled the open house and “removed advertising and promotional materials” (Fox River Resort Club v. Vairt Inc., Dkt. 9-2, 14-3).

Every later report of “strict Sharia law” I have traced leads back to Reid’s description. Reid did not produce the pamphlet on October 8. He should. Every board member who voted should have asked to see it first.

That the project was oriented toward Muslim families is true. That it was marketed as faith-based and gated is true. That it offered Sharia-compliant ownership is true. That residents would be governed under strict Sharia law is not documented by anything the public has seen.

Sharia-compliant finance is a set of rules about how a believer may borrow, lend, and own. American lenders have offered it for more than two decades. Sharia as civil government is religious authority deciding disputes, controlling who may live where, and binding people who never consented to it. The first is a financing product. The second would collide with the U.S. Constitution, the Fair Housing Act, and Illinois law all at once.

V Resort Living calls the governance claims “misinformation,” says the project “was never intended to be a Muslim-only community,” and says American law would govern it (Illinois Valley Times, June 16, 2026). That denial contradicts the company’s own faith-based, gated marketing. The documents that would settle the question (the homeowners’ association rules, residency criteria, visitor and security policies, investor offering materials, and original marketing) have not been made public. Vairt could end much of this argument by releasing them.

What the Board Actually Did

Reid told his colleagues where the text of the resolution came from:

“I didn’t write this. This was written by Congressman Keith Self of the state of Texas.” He added, “All I added was the county of LaSalle and the state of Illinois” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

The record supports him. U.S. Representative Keith Self (R-TX), co-founder of the U.S. House Sharia-Free America Caucus, introduced H. Con. Res. 116, Denouncing Sharia Law in the United States, on September 3. The LaSalle text follows it closely, often word for word, down to the closing “denounces Sharia law in all forms” (GovInfo, H. Con. Res. 116).

In June, Self had introduced H.R. 9567, the Preserving Our Constitution Act of 2026, which would bar federal courts and agencies from recognizing “any foreign law, religious law, custom, or practice” that conflicts with the Constitution (GovInfo, H.R. 9567).

That is how LaSalle County ended up with a resolution whose title does not match its text. The title’s “foreign or religious law” tracks the neutral June bill. The body is the September resolution, which targets one faith. The board’s attorney told members,

“The prior resolution I looked at didn’t have any reference to a particular religion in it. This one does.”

Board member Stephen Aubry read the closing clause aloud and called the drafting “somewhat deceptive. . . Isn’t this actually what the resolution is about? Why isn’t that the title?” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

The attorney warned the board that a local ordinance elsewhere that “only mentions Sharia law” “was found to be discriminatory against that one religion and was not upheld,” and that Oklahoma’s statewide referendum “was ruled unconstitutional.” Then: “I have many legal concerns about that aspect of it.”

When members discussed reducing the measure to one sentence affirming that the U.S. and Illinois constitutions override all other law, the attorney answered,

“If you want to amend this resolution to what you said in that one sentence, you’d be good.”

Nobody offered the amendment. The board passed the text as written (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

The resolution has no legal force. One board member asked the attorney:

“What would this resolution prohibit that existing law does not already permit?”

The answer: the board enforces zoning, and the sheriff and the State’s Attorney handle criminal matters. The resolution’s only operative clause denounces and opposes. It prohibits nothing. The title promises a prohibition the text never enacts.

The board had documented reasons to scrutinize this project: a buyer that did not own the property, a use the county had never approved, and finances that do not match their owner’s claims. It acted on the one claim nobody has documented. The danger is in the language the board chose to keep. Reid told the board,

“Islam is not a race. It is an ideological system of political governance” (Shaw Local, Oct. 14, 2026).

Courts consider statements like that when making decisions. When Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment that named Sharia, a federal court blocked it, and in 2012 the Tenth Circuit upheld that decision because the law singled out one religion (Pew Research Center, Apr. 2013).

The laws that have survived are written in neutral terms and enforced evenly. LaSalle County’s title is neutral. But its text names one faith dozens of times. The board’s own attorney warned them, offered a fix, and they declined. If the county ever tries to use this resolution against a specific zoning application, the record of October 8 will be Exhibit A for the applicant’s lawyers.

The LaSalle text adds one claim of its own: that “an estimated 513,000” women and girls in the United States have undergone female genital mutilation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes that figure as women and girls who “are at risk for FGM/C or may have undergone the procedure” (CDC), many of them before they ever arrived here. A resolution about the rule of law should get its own numbers right.

Aubry asked whether the sheriff or State’s Attorney can even enforce the county’s zoning rules at the resort:

“At this point, no, they’re not. So, that’s what we as a county board need to be going after, not this” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

Early press reports added to the confusion. The Illinois Valley Times reported that the board rejected the resolution, and Shaw Local called a 12-to-13 vote a failed motion to table. The video shows that vote was a failed motion to end debate, which needed two-thirds, and that the resolution then passed 13 to 12 (Illinois Valley Times, Oct. 8, 2026; Shaw Local, Oct. 14, 2026).

The Other Side of the Room

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as the nation’s largest Muslim civil-rights and advocacy organization. In 2007, federal prosecutors named it among 246 unindicted co-conspirators and joint venturers in United States v. Holy Land Foundation. In 2008, a jury convicted the foundation and five of its leaders of funneling about $12.4 million to Hamas (U.S. Department of Justice, Nov. 24, 2008).

CAIR was never charged. In 2009, the FBI told Congress it had “suspended all formal contacts between CAIR and the FBI” (Middle East Forum, May 7, 2009). U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis later ruled that prosecutors should not have named the groups publicly, but found “ample evidence” of CAIR’s association with the foundation and with Hamas (JTA, Nov. 26, 2010).

In November 2025, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization under state law. CAIR is fighting the designation in federal court (Office of the Governor, Nov. 18, 2025).

CAIR-Chicago called Reid’s remarks Islamophobic and demanded the board censure him. Executive Director Ahmed Rehab said Illinois law would govern any development in Illinois. CAIR also reported that Vairt’s team and prospective residents faced “significant misinformation, hostility, and, in some cases, threats” (Chicago Defender, June 2026).

CAIR has not made the specifics of those threats public. A buyer whose numbers do not add up, defended by an organization with CAIR’s record, gives the county every reason to ask hard questions. None of them requires invoking concerns over claims of establishing a Sharia-compliant community, a claim for which no documentation has been advanced.

Some of the opposition handed CAIR its talking points. At the July 9 meeting, one resident said the buyers and the people they would bring are “entirely incompatible” with the community and “simply not welcome here” if they cannot assimilate (Shaw Local, July 10, 2026).

On October 8, an opposition speaker called the Prophet Muhammad “a war criminal and a murderer” and said,

“Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

Another supporter of the resolution told the board, “This is not about race, nationality, or religion,” and urged members to “judge individuals and organizations by their conduct and documented actions, not simply by their religion.”

A Marine veteran who fought in Fallujah and trained Iraqi police warned that judging all Muslims by the worst of what he saw in Iraq “would commit a massive disservice to those people as well as my community” (LaSalle County Board meeting video, Oct. 8, 2026).

Americans of every faith have the right to buy property, build houses of worship, and raise their children near people who share their beliefs. Catholics, Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and Latter-day Saints have all done it. That right protects every church in LaSalle County.

Hostility has not been confined to LaSalle County, or aimed only at Muslims. In September 2025, Christian minister Ted Barham objected at a Dearborn, Michigan, council meeting to a street sign honoring a local publisher he accused of backing Hezbollah and Hamas. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud answered from the dais:

“Because you are a bigot, and you are a racist, and you are an Islamophobe. Although you live here, I want you to know, as mayor, you are not welcome here” (Patch, Sept. 2025).

A Muslim mayor who tells a Christian citizen he is not welcome in his own city has failed to embrace our founding principles. A resident who tells Muslim families they are “simply not welcome here” has failed that too. Discrimination against Christians, Jews, or anyone else is a problem wherever it appears, whether by a mayor, a legislator, or a private citizen, and the more subtle versions are equally wrong.

Christians who want that standard enforced in Dearborn have to keep it in LaSalle County.

Our Founders settled this question early. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Virginia’s religious-freedom statute was meant to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination” (The Founding Fathers and Islam, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, May 2002). In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, 92 percent of American Muslims said they were proud to be American (Pew Research Center, July 26, 2017). The freedom runs both ways.

Muslims have the same freedom every other American has to live by their faith, and the same obligation never to use any authority, religious or civil, to take another person’s rights.

The Real Problem Illinois Has Already Seen

With years of claims about American “Sharia zones,” I have not found a single verified case of a town or development where Islamic law displaced civil law. What the record does show is harm inside families, where a rule presented as religious duty falls on a woman or a child who is not in any position to refuse it. We have experienced such cases in Illinois.

In 2017, a Lake County woman filed for divorce. Her husband answered that their marriage had already been dissolved in India and that, as pious Muslims, his actions “complied with sharia law.” His own lawyer conceded she “didn’t have formal notice that we talk about in our country.” The Lake County judge dismissed her petition anyway:

“I don’t think I have any choice but to dismiss.”

In April 2019, a unanimous appellate panel reversed. It found that the Indian tribunal never gave her a chance to be heard, and that the trial court “did not consider American law and fundamental precepts of due process such as the right to notice and the right to defend one’s interests” (In re Marriage of Basith, 2019 IL App (2d) 180332-U; Patch, Apr. 23, 2019).

Illinois law already protected her. She had to appeal to get that protection.

In 2017, federal prosecutors charged a Detroit-area doctor with performing genital cutting on nine girls at a Livonia clinic. Three of those girls came from Illinois. The doctor, a member of the Dawoodi Bohra, a small Muslim sect, called it “a religious custom” (Fox Illinois).

In November 2018, a federal judge dismissed the mutilation charges, ruling that Congress lacked the constitutional power to pass the 1996 federal ban (Fox 21). Congress has since rewritten the law (U.S. Department of Justice, Jan. 2021). Illinois got there first: female genital mutilation has been a Class X felony here since 1998, and a parent’s consent is no defense (Illinois General Assembly, P.A. 90-88).

This is where the danger remains: in divorce, custody, inheritance, private arbitration, and the bodies of children.

A woman who has no lawyer, doesn’t speak the language, or has no family willing to back her can lose rights that every other Illinois resident takes for granted, because of bullying that takes place behind closed doors. So can a child. A county board resolution has no impact on such cases. A state statute does.

One such statute is already filed in Springfield. House Bill 4165, filed by state Rep. John Cabello on October 16, 2025, and co-sponsored by House Republican Leader Tony McCombie, would make void any Illinois court ruling, arbitration award, or contract clause that applies Sharia or any foreign law in a way that denies a party the rights guaranteed by the U.S. or Illinois Constitution.

It has not moved out of the House Rules Committee in a year (Illinois General Assembly, HB 4165). Tightened around due process and equal protection, and stripped of any language a court could read as targeting one faith, it would protect the next woman in Lake County, or LaSalle County, or any county in the state. It deserves a hearing.

What Should Happen Now

If you live in LaSalle County: The board reconvenes Monday, November 2, at 1:00 p.m. in Room 250 of the County Government Complex, 707 E. Etna Road, Ottawa. Go, and ask your board member to do what the county’s own attorney said would work: amend the resolution so its text matches its title, one clear statement that the U.S. and Illinois constitutions govern every county proceeding. Ask the County Clerk for the signed resolution and the “prior resolution” the attorney reviewed. Ask your board member to obtain and release the “original pamphlet.”

Ask the Land Use Department for every communication it received from Vairt and its attorneys. These are public records under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

If Vairt wants the community’s trust: Publish the offering documents, the proposed residency rules, the HOA declaration, the visitor and security policies, and the original marketing. A company that says it will follow American law can show it.

If you live anywhere in Illinois: Call your state representative and ask for a hearing on a neutral, constitutionally sound version of HB 4165 that protects every Illinois resident from any foreign or religious tribunal that denies them their rights. The woman in Lake County should not have needed an appeal to get the due process she was owed.

One law for everyone is the right principle; it’s our founding principle.