A The British political commentator arrested by US immigration authorities over his pro-Palestinian advocacy said shortly after his return to the UK on Thursday that his arrest “was not so much an attack on me as it was an attack on Americans and the rights of Americans themselves.”
Sami Hamdi arrived in London on Thursday, three weeks after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at San Francisco International Airport while on a speaking tour in the United States. He agreed to leave the country after being granted the right to apply for a new US visa, which he says he intends to do.
“What they want is to ensure that people like us don’t go to America,” he told The Guardian in an interview shortly after returning home, citing the arrest of foreign students earlier this year for their political activism. We will challenge them, exercise our constitutional rights, and speak the truth against hatred.”
Hamdi, an outspoken advocate for the Palestinians and a frequent commentator on global political issues, said he was denied medical care due to severe abdominal pain while in detention until his wife alerted the media to his condition. “The only way the medical team will come is if you fall to the ground,” he remembers a guard telling him. But the most difficult aspect for him and his fellow detainees is not knowing how long their ordeal might last.
The Trump administration defended Hamdi’s October 26 arrest by portraying him as a “terrorist sympathizer,” offering no evidence other than sharing an edited video by the pro-Israel group Mamri in which Hamdi appears to praise Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. In the clips, Hamdi calls on his audience not to “pity” the Palestinians but rather “celebrate their victory.”
He also says: “God has shown the world that no normalization can erase the Palestinian issue.” “How many of you felt it in your hearts when you heard the news of this happening? How many of you felt ecstatic?”
Hamdi said that the video was edited to misunderstand his words, and noted that he denounced violence during the same speech correlation. “They knew it was out of context, they knew it didn’t reflect anything that people claimed it reflected,” he said. He also spoke of the irony of finding himself in the same position as Donald Trump, whose words were also “packaged” for a BBC programme. “The irony of it is that Donald Trump is now suing the BBC over a stitched video,” he said. (Trump’s lawyers have threatened to sue for $1 billion (£759 million) in damages unless the BBC retracts, apologizes and settles with him. The BBC apologized on Thursday.)
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of state for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement on Thursday that Hamdi is “an illegal alien and terrorist sympathizer who cheered on Hamas after its October 7 terror attack.”
She added: “Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country.” “That’s just common sense.”
According to Hamdi’s lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the government never charged him with any crimes or claimed he posed a security threat, but did charge him with overstaying his visa after it was abruptly canceled without notifying him shortly before his arrest. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to questions regarding the cancellation of Hamdi’s visa or the specific charges against him.
“If the government had any credible evidence behind the insinuations it promoted on social media, Hamdi would not be free today under voluntary departure,” the group wrote in a statement. Cair stressed that Hamdi “has not been deported or deported, but rather will leave on his own terms under a voluntary arrangement that does not include preventing future entry.”
Hamdi was touring the United States to talk about what he called the American government’s “Israel First” policies. Days before his arrest, right-wing activist Laura Loomer launched a campaign on social media attacking him.
While waiting to board a flight from San Francisco to Florida, DHS agents stopped him and told him his visa had been revoked, but offered no other explanation. He said: “I was thrown into the back of a truck in a very narrow and suffocating place. I was taken for five hours to a random location in the middle of nowhere. I was not told where I was going, and I was not allowed to contact my lawyer.” It was later learned that Laura Loomer had published a story about his detention at that time, writing:scalp“In X’s post.
Hamdi said the most “heartbreaking” aspect of his experience was witnessing the conditions of people detained in immigration detention centers in the United States. He said that when the men arrested with him learned he was a journalist, they shared harrowing stories of months-long bureaucratic ordeals that took them away from their families.
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Hamdi recalls that one man from a Latin American country had a green card and had lived in the United States for 42 years. He was married to an American citizen and had American citizen children. He was detained during his regular immigration check-in and his case was delayed for months. Another man, a 23-year-old Chechen, had sought asylum in the United States to avoid being drafted into combat in Ukraine, but spent 10 months in an immigration detention center, which led to him falling into a deep depression. At one point, the men were watching television when an ad came on saying the Trump administration was “deporting criminals.”
“You look around and there are no criminals,” Hamdi said. “The worst thing about being detained is watching all the other prisoners around me, and how miserable they have become, not because they don’t deserve to be in America, but simply because they don’t even appear before a judge.”
“It’s a tragedy of justice; you really feel like they’re forgotten people,” he added.
Hamdi warned that the increasingly strict tactics followed by US immigration officials would deter more people from traveling to the United States. “Let’s assume someone waves the Palestinian flag” at next year’s World Cup, he said. “Does this mean their visa will be cancelled?”
He added: “They are trying to curb freedom of expression because there is concern among the extremist Israeli lobby that American public opinion will shift.”
He also pointed to the recent election of Zahran Mamdani in New York as evidence that efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian rhetoric in the United States have failed.
“To the extent that there is an attempt to silence pro-Palestinian activity or to the extent that there is an attempt to control what Americans can hear or listen to… American public opinion has changed,” he said. “In reality, it is not the extremist lobby that wins. In fact, it is truth and justice that wins and the extremists explode in a state of hysteria.”