The American state’s increasingly intrusive immigration police have abducted a prominent British Arab journalist, speaker, and analyst, Sami Hamdi Hachimi, at the San Francisco airport on October 26, 2025.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE for short, sent a chill through much of the Muslim populace and many other citizens with its brazen imprisonment of a visitor with a visa for no other reason than that his pro-Palestine advocacy had riled up far-right pro-Israel media personalities, who both incited and celebrated the move even as it sent a wave of revulsion through much of the world.

An analyst of Tunisian and Algerian descent educated in Britain, Hamdi came into particular prominence as a pro-Palestine commentator after Israel’s genocide of Gaza began two years ago, where his advocacy, analysis, and encouragement of both Muslim and non-Muslim activism against the genocide earned a wide audience. He is a respected, longstanding commentator on international affairs, risk, and intelligence, and has spent the last decade analyzing and advising on political affairs in countries including Britain, the United States, Syria, Turkiye, Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and others. His frequent appearances on The Thinking Muslim podcast hosted by political scientist Muhammad Jalal have been particularly influential, with millions of viewers, and he has been invited to speak at both Muslim and other events in multiple countries, including the United States. Abducted at San Francisco Airport, it took two days before Hamdi could see a legal team; among the lawyers who have spoken in his favour are the well-regarded Hussam Ayloush and Mariam Uddin.

The ICE agency, led by Kristi Noem in the cabinet and Tom Homan, has been notorious in its overreach throughout 2025. Purportedly fulfilling a vow by Donald Trump to deport illegal residents in the United States, it has frequently overstepped its authority and been accused on numerous occasions of lawless targeting, racial profiling, and abuse, inevitably aimed at minorities. The ruling clique has made a virtue of deportations with the promise that these will retrieve stagnant wages and “put America first.” This is part of a general surge of ultranationalist posturing with very real consequences.

Among the major posturers are Laura Loomer and Amy Mekelburg, whose ultranationalist messaging in this trend of putting “America first” has an additional irony in its consistent slant toward Israel and its interests. Though both are Jewish-Americans who claim to be standing up for Jewish rights, they have also repeatedly attacked Jewish organizations that fail to share their political stance. In addition to copious amounts of racial vitriol, both have squarely targeted Islam and repeatedly directed calumny and slander at the faith, its prophets, and precepts.

Loomer and Mekelburg are part of a wider intersection between the international right-wing and Israel, particularly the Likud party, whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu-Mileikowsky, has pushed similar anti-Muslim rhetoric for over forty years and now presides over the genocide on Gaza. Such “influencers” proliferated both with the “war on terrorism” and the subsequent financial crash, both of which incentivized far-right invective with a disproportionate focus on Muslims: Stephen “Tommy Robinson” Yaxley-Lennon and Douglas Murray in Britain are similar provocateurs whose far-right messaging explicitly attacks Islam and glorifies Tel Aviv, whose genocide is portrayed as a civilizational war against Islam.

In the aftermath of Hamdi’s abduction, Mekelburg took to social media to crow, “WE DID IT, LAURA! ONE DOWN….SO MANY MORE TO GO!” [sic]

Far-right provocateurs such as Loomer have long attacked any form of public Muslim activity as linked to the “Muslim Brotherhood”, against whom she also incited in her celebration of Hamdi’s abduction. Among the many targets of this alleged “Muslim Brotherhood” ring is the Council for American-Islamic Relations, whose representative Ayloush noted that Hamdi’s case is linked to pro-Israel incitement against Muslims, that the imprisonment violated the American principles of free speech, and that “this is not the time to be intimidated.”

Hamdi’s ordeal serves to highlight a key point that he himself has long made about the significance of pro-Palestine activism and the drastic, draconian steps that the Zionist lobby has urged to undermine them.

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