British journalist Sami Hamdi, who says he was held illegally for more than two weeks by United States immigration authorities for his pro-Palestinian commentary, has described his detention as “like something from the movies”.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hamdi accused the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of using “loopholes” to abuse people, and he directed attention towards the plight of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention.
The 35-year-old British citizen was stopped at San Francisco International Airport in California on October 26 midway through a speaking tour discussing Israel’s war on Gaza.
Hamdi said Laura Loomer and other right-wing activists and allies of President Donald Trump created the grounds for his arrest by posting his lectures and calling for his visa to be revoked.
Homeland Security Department authorities stopped Hamdi at the airport and told him his visa had been revoked. However, they refused to allow him to immediately leave the US by flying to London instead of his planned domestic flight.
“And then four other ICE agents appeared out of nowhere,” he told Al Jazeera. “They surrounded me, and then they escorted me outside of the airport where a black car with tinted windows was waiting for me. They told me, ‘Get in the car.’”
He was given a few moments to use his phone after insisting on his legal rights as a United Kingdom citizen, which he used to contact the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The civil rights group agreed to help him get legal representation and inform his family of his detention.
After three car rides in handcuffs, he arrived at an ICE detention facility and was checked in with a number of other people of various ethnicities.
He later discovered through a lawyer that he was being held in Golden State Annex in McFarland, California, in what he labelled “a very politically motivated manoeuvre”.
Hamdi said he and 20 other men were held in a small cell with no facilities. Inmates repeatedly had their cases delayed through bureaucracy, he said.
One Latino man named Antonio whose wife and children are US citizens had been in detention for 10 months without charge, Hamdi said.
“This is the tragedy. You have these people who are illegally detained, who shouldn’t be there longer than six months, according to all habeas corpus rules, but who stay there longer because of bureaucratic loopholes,” said the journalist, who returned to London on Thursday.
ICE agents were “particularly aggressive” and most displayed “little sympathy for the people they were dealing with”, Hamdi said. They appeared to feel that they could act with “impunity”, he continued.
The journalist noted that while his case has received much attention, he believes it is important to remember that thousands of Palestinians remain incarcerated in Israeli military prisons in appalling conditions.
“It’s important to note that arbitrary detention for the sake of expression of freedom of speech isn’t something that’s under threat just in America or in the UK.”
