Soumaya Hamdi was planning for the family holiday she would soon be taking with her husband when she received a text message that changed everything. “Is it true that Sami is being abducted?” a friend asked.
She had called her husband, British-Tunisian commentator and journalist Sami Hamdi, earlier that day to check in on him, as he travelled around the United States on a speaking tour discussing Israel’s war on Gaza. When he didn’t answer, Soumaya had assumed he was at a speaking engagement.
Instead, he had been detained by US immigration authorities, news that came as “a complete shock”, she told Al Jazeera.
“That’s not the text message that I think anyone ever wants to read,” she said
It was Sunday, October 26. Sami had been stopped at San Francisco International Airport. Unbeknownst to him, his visa had been revoked by US authorities two days earlier after a pressure campaign by anti-Muslim and pro-Israel social media influencers.
The detention of the 35-year-old critic of Israel’s genocide on Gaza has sparked a legal battle, with his lawyers filing emergency petitions against his detention and his wife, British parliamentarians and UK civil society groups demanding their government take action.
His case is the latest in what Muslim advocacy groups describe as a campaign to silence pro-Palestinian voices in the US through immigration enforcement.
‘Bundled into a black van’
Hamdi’s speaking tour was just his latest across the US – his commentary emphasising continued support for the Palestinian people has grown in popularity among American Muslims and pro-Palestinians since the war on Gaza began in October 2023.
On Saturday evening, he addressed the annual gala of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil right advocacy group, in Sacramento and was due to speak at another CAIR event in Florida the next day.
But as he moved through San Francisco airport’s domestic terminal on Sunday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers approached him.
“They took him to a big black van,” Soumaya said, recounting what her husband later told her when she later reached him. “He asked them, and this must have been the second or third time, he said, ‘I need to be able to tell someone that I’ve been taken by ICE.’ So they said, ‘OK, you got one text message.’”
Hamdi managed to send a brief message to CAIR before officers confiscated his phone. When Soumaya later called, an ICE officer answered and hung up on her.
“The officer himself hung me up, then switched the phone off,” she said.
It was around midnight when Hamdi was finally able to call his wife for 30 seconds from the Golden State Annex detention centre in California, some five to six hours from the airport.
“He sounded really under pressure,” Soumaya recalled.
Days later, authorities transferred him in the middle of the night to another facility for processing before returning him and interrogating him without his lawyers present, she said.
She has spoken to him twice since his detention.
The couple have three children, including a 10-month-old baby. “The kids don’t understand why they can’t reach him,” Soumaya said. “Sami is a family man.”
Legal challenge
On Tuesday, CAIR’s California chapter filed a federal habeas corpus petition, requiring the government to justify Hamdi’s detention, along with an emergency temporary restraining order to stop authorities from moving him.
The filings aim to stop officials from moving Hamdi to a distant facility, a step CAIR says could isolate him from his lawyers and friends.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Hamdi “cheered on” the October 7 Hamas-led attacks, while the spokesperson for the DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, said, “Those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country.”
It shared an edited clip by MEMRI, a pro-Israel group which says it is an extremism monitor, to justify his detention, in which Hamdi said: “Don’t pity them [the Palestinians], they don’t want your pity, celebrate their victory.”
A week later, and on several subsequent occasions, Hamdi clarified his remarks. “What Muslims are celebrating is not war; they’re celebrating the revival of a cause – a just cause,” Hamdi told The Thinking Muslim podcast a week after October 7. His family have pointed to Hamdi’s own words – “Racism, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, genocide, and war crimes need no explanation or definitions for humanity to recognise them and stand firmly against them”.
Soumaya, dismissed the allegations against her husband as “outrageous” and a “smear campaign targeting his advocacy for Palestinian rights”.
“The reason why these allegations have been made about Sami is because he’s become too effective of a speaker,” said Soumaya. “He’s on record as saying that billions shouldn’t be sent by the American government to save Israel when American citizens need housing and healthcare … So it’s not like he’s been criticising the United States, he’s been criticising a foreign government, and he’s being targeted for that.”
In an open letter to Vice President JD Vance, Sami’s father, Mohamed El-Hachmi Hamdi, said criticism of Israel was “not a crime but a moral duty”, adding that his son should “be encouraged, not sanctioned and barred from entering America”.
Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area office, which assembled Hamdi’s legal defence, told Al Jazeera the challenge aims to protect Hamdi’s constitutional rights.
“Despite what Laura Loomer, Amy Mekelberg and various government accounts have been tweeting, no charges have been levied against Sami,” she said, referring to far-right activists who claimed credit for his detention.
Billoo likened Hamdi’s case to other foreign pro-Palestine advocates detained by ICE, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Badar Khan Suri.
The Trump administration has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law being broadly interpreted to allow the government to target foreign nationals whose speech it deems harmful to US foreign policy.
Immigration lawyer Hassan Ahmad, who represents Sami and has taken other similar cases like Suri’s, told Al Jazeera this reflects “a broad crackdown on Palestinian advocacy through immigration law”.
He said Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are “distinct but frequently overlap, and we’ve seen that more since October. This is part of the larger problem of de jure Islamophobia in the US justice system.”
“This is weaponising immigration to implement structural anti-Palestinian racism,” Billoo said.
Billoo added that CAIR was concerned about an increase in Islamophobia following the onset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has “increased to levels we hadn’t seen before”.
According to CAIR’s latest civil rights report, the organisation received a record 8,658 complaints in 2024, the highest since it began compiling data in 1996.
The report attributed the surge to what it called “the US-backed Gaza genocide”, which “drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States”, with complaints spanning employment discrimination, education, law enforcement encounters and hate crimes.
The US human rights group Common Dreams’ new report, Solidarity as a Crime, released this month, paints a stark picture of what it calls a “nationwide campaign to silence solidarity” with Palestinians across the United States, citing censorship, arrests, campus crackdowns and deportations targeting pro-Palestinian advocacy.
‘Wholly inadequate’ UK response
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told Al Jazeera it is “providing consular assistance” and is “in touch with local authorities and his family”.
But Soumaya described the response as “wholly inadequate”. She said US authorities are “blocking” FCDO officials from receiving information about why Hamdi’s visa was revoked.
“We’re talking about a British citizen with a valid US visa who has already been allowed to enter the United States,” she said. “The FCDO should recognise that this is really alarming.”
Five UK members of parliament, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, issued a statement last week calling on the government to secure consular access and demand Hamdi’s safe return.
The National Union of Journalists and International Federation of Journalists also called for his immediate release. Seamus Dooley, NUJ assistant general secretary, said there “is no evidence that, as a journalist, he is guilty of a terrorist offence, and he should be released”.
The Muslim Council of Britain urged the government to take “urgent diplomatic action”, saying, “Press freedom cannot be selective and we urge the British Government to come to the defence of its citizens being detained in this manner.”
Billoo emphasised the stakes extend beyond one individual. “If the United States government could treat an internationally renowned political analyst, journalist and British citizen in this way, we’re all forced to wonder: Are we safe? What can we say?”
The detention has devastated the family, his wife said. “Sami misses the kids when he’s travelling. He misses all of his family,” Soumaya said. “His mum and dad are extremely anxious and worried for his wellbeing, too.”
“You know, if you want him out of the country, just send him home,” she said, adding, “He has a family that miss him dearly and would be very happy for him to come home to. So what’s the reason for depriving him of his liberty and his freedom and keeping him locked up.”
