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A British political commentator who was detained by immigration authorities in the US over his pro-Palestinian advocacy said shortly after returning to the UK on Thursday that his detention was “less an attack on me and more 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 US. He agreed to leave the country after being guaranteed the right to apply for a new US visa, which he says he plans 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 detention earlier this year of foreign students over their political activity. “And we will defy them and we will exert our constitutional rights and speak truth against hatred.”
Hamdi, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate and frequent commentator on global political issues, said that he was denied medical care for severe abdominal pain while in detention until his wife alerted the media to his condition. A guard told him “the only way the medical team will come is if you drop down on the floor”, he recalled. But the most challenging aspect for him and his fellow detainees was not knowing how long their ordeals might last.
The Trump administration defended Hamdi’s 26 October arrest by painting him as a “terrorist sympathizer”, providing no evidence but sharing an edited montage by the pro-Israel group Memri in which Hamdi appeared to praise the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. In the clips, Hamdi calls on his audience not to “pity” the Palestinians but to “celebrate their victory”.
“Allah has shown the world that no normalization can erase the Palestinian cause,” he also says. “How many of you feel it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened? How many of you felt the euphoria?”
Hamdi said the video was edited to misconstrue his words and noted that he denounced violence during the same speaking engagement. “They knew it was out of context, they knew that it did not reflect anything that people claimed that it reflected,” he said. He also spoke of the irony of finding himself in the same position as Donald Trump, whose words were also “stitched” together in a BBC programme. “The irony of it is that Donald Trump is now suing the BBC over a stitched video,” he said. (Lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn (£759m) in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him. The BBC apologised on Thursday.)
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said in a statement on Thursday that Hamdi was “an illegal alien and terrorist sympathizer who cheered on Hamas following its October 7 terrorist attack”.
“Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country,” she added. “That’s just common sense.”
According to Hamdi’s lawyers with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), the government never accused him of any crimes nor alleged he posed a security threat, but charged him with overstaying his visa after abruptly cancelling it without notifying him shortly before his arrest. The DHS did not immediately respond to questions about Hamdi’s visa cancellation or specific charges against him.
“If the government had any credible evidence behind the insinuations it amplified on social media, Hamdi would not be walking free today under a voluntary departure,” the group wrote in a statement. Cair emphasised that Hamdi “is not being deported or removed but is instead departing on his own terms under a voluntary arrangement that does not include a bar to future entry”.
Hamdi was touring the US to talk about what he called the American government’s “Israel first” policies. Days before his detention, the rightwing activist Laura Loomer had launched a social media campaign attacking him.
While waiting to board a flight from San Francisco to Florida, he was stopped by DHS agents who told him his visa had been revoked but offered no further explanation. “I was thrown in the back of a van in a very tight, claustrophobic space, driven for five hours to a random location in the middle of nowhere, not being told where I’m going, not allowed to call my lawyer,” he said. He later learned that Laura Loomer posted about his detention at the time, writing “SCALP” in an X post.
Hamdi said the most “heartbreaking” aspect of his experience was witnessing the conditions of people held in US immigration detention. When the men he was detained with learned he was a journalist, he said, they shared harrowing stories of months-long bureaucratic ordeals that had kept them separated from their families.
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One man from a Latin American country, Hamdi recalled, was a green card holder who had lived in the US for 42 years, was married to a US citizen and had US citizen children. He was detained at his regular immigration check-in and his case kept getting adjourned by months. Another man, a 23-year-old from Chechnya, had sought asylum in the US to avoid being conscripted into fighting in Ukraine, but had spent 10 months in immigration detention, falling into a deep depression. At one point, the men were watching TV when an ad came on saying that the Trump administration was “deporting criminals”.
“And you look around you and there are no criminals,” Hamdi said. “The worst part of my detention was watching all of the other inmates around me, and just how miserable they’ve become, not because they don’t deserve to be in America but simply because they’re not even being brought in front of a judge.”
“It is such a tragedy of justice; you really feel like they are forgotten people,” he added.
Hamdi warned that the increasingly draconian ways of US immigration officials would deter more people from travelling to the US. “Let’s suppose somebody waves a Palestinian flag” at the World Cup next year, he posited. “Does that mean that their visa is going to be revoked?”
He added: “They are trying to curb freedom of speech because there’s a concern among the extremist Israeli lobby that American public opinion is shifting.”
He also pointed to the recent election of Zohran Mamdani in New York as a sign that efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian speech in the US were failing.
“As much as there is an attempt to silence pro-Palestinian activism or as much as there is an attempt to sort of control what Americans can hear or listen to … the American public has shifted,” he said. “In reality, it’s not the extremist lobby that is winning. It’s actually truth and justice that’s winning and the extremists are lashing out in a hysteria.”
