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For more than a week, Sami Hamdi, a British political commentator, has been in ICE detention. He was arrested in San Francisco while on a speaking tour hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States. Hamdi has done several such tours in his role as the managing director of International Interest, an organization that advises governments and companies on geopolitical risk, and he frequently appears on British news programs to discuss politics in the Middle East. Hamdi is known for his outspoken position in support of Palestine, for which he has gained visibility in the past two years. He spent most of 2024, for instance, telling people not to vote for Joe Biden. He also said, on a 2023 podcast, “I think that’s a very important message to the Muslims: we don’t celebrate bloodlust, we don’t celebrate death, and we don’t celebrate war. What Muslims are celebrating is not war, they’re celebrating the revival of a just cause that everybody thought was dead. This is an important distinction.”

Hamdi’s arrest was first announced by Laura Loomer, the far-right anti-Muslim troll with close ties to the Trump administration, via a triumphant post on X with the word “SCOOP” and a siren emoji: “As a direct result of Amy [Mekelburg]’s report and my relentless pressure on the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, US officials have now moved to take action against Hamdi’s visa status and his continued presence in this country.” Mekelburg, likewise a vocal Islamophobe on social media, where she is better known as Amy Mek, added on X later that day: “Let this be a warning to every Brotherhood front, every jihadist operative, and every Marxist collaborator who treats America as a platform: exposure without pressure achieves nothing.”

The following day, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed Hamdi’s arrest by posting on its official account on X: “The US has no obligation to host foreigners, like Sami Hamdi, who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans. And we won’t. Thanks to the work of @Sec_Noem and @SecRubio and the men and women of law enforcement, Sami Hamdi’s visa was revoked and he is in ICE custody pending removal.” Attached to the DHS post was a clip of Hamdi speaking after the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, in which he says, “How many of you felt it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened? How many of you felt the euphoria? Allahu akbar.” Hamdi subsequently clarified that he was speaking about the Palestinian cause getting more attention but was not celebrating the deaths of Israelis. 

The circumstances of Hamdi’s arrest are alarming. His visitor visa was revoked without warning; he does not face criminal charges. DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin publicly accused him of supporting terrorism. Hamdi’s wife called his detention an abduction. She told The Guardian on Thursday that she spoke to her husband on the phone for just thirty seconds, during which he told her he had been taken to an immigration detention center in McFarland, California. The couple’s three children, she added, were under a lot of stress. “We’re being kept in the dark,” she said. “To hear through a third party that he has been abducted, effectively, by the United States government is incredibly distressing.”

It is unclear whether DHS arrested Hamdi as a direct result of posts from Mek and Loomer. Still, the optics and timing are striking, with DHS statements echoing their language. In August, the New York Times reported that Loomer was behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to stop medical evacuations of sick children from Gaza to the US for treatment. According to the report, Loomer had called the flights full of children a “national security threat.”

CAIR’s California chapter said in a statement on Tuesday: “Every single person on American soil, including immigrants and visitors, has the right to free speech and other fundamental freedoms. If the government can cancel a valid visa because it does not like what a person says or believes, then anyone legally visiting, studying, or working in our country—whether conservative or liberal, religious or secular—would be in danger of abduction and deportation if the government happens to dislike their speech.”

Hamdi’s legal team similarly argues that his speech while in the United States is protected. On Saturday, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order preventing ICE from transferring him out of California while proceedings continue. According to a CAIR press release, the court “believes Hamdi’s legal team has raised serious questions regarding whether his detention was retaliation for protected speech under the First Amendment.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has urged Rubio to clarify the State Department’s decisions to revoke visas. The situation reminded observers of the dark days that began this century. As Mehdi Hasan put it recently, “We’re back to post-9/11 days. Anyone you don’t like is a terrorist.”

Hamdi’s arrest came the same month that another foreign journalist, Mario Guevara, was deported by ICE to El Salvador. Guevara was an accredited Salvadoran journalist seeking asylum in the US. He covered immigration in the Atlanta area for about twenty years before he was arrested in June during a livestream of anti-Trump protests. “Guevara’s case is a singular and devastating blow to this country’s commitment to freedom of the press,” Betsy Morais wrote for CJR. The cases of Hamdi and Guevara represent twin assaults on press freedom. One is aimed at sending a chilling message to foreign reporters in the United States; the other shows the nefarious relationship between far-right influencers and government decision-makers.

Hamdi’s situation is also part of a larger crackdown on criticism of Israel. Given the enormity of the government’s overreach, his arrest has been met with relative silence in the media. For years, many have denounced Donald Trump as an existential threat to press freedom, but the vanishing of a prominent political commentator goes far beyond Trump’s habit of incivility toward reporters. Had such an arrest happened anywhere else in the world, I believe it would spark a collective outcry and an urgent response, such as we rightly saw over the detention of Evan Gershkovich, the foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who was jailed on espionage charges in Russia until last year. But in this case, the person targeted is pro-Palestine. The muted reaction is a troubling public response to a troubling act of state power—an act that soon risks extending to other forms of dissent. 

Other Notable Stories…
By CJR staff

• Radio Free Asia has shut down its news operations as a result of the Trump administration pulling federal funding and the ongoing government shutdown. “There’s no money coming through,” Cameron Lang, the associate general counsel at Radio Free Asia, told the New York Times. This makes Radio Free Asia the second federally funded news organization to stop production, after Voice of America, which ceased broadcasting at the start of October. For CJR, Liam Scott has written about the last days at VOA and the fight to protect Radio Free Asia’s journalists.

• Following Paramount’s merger with Skydance and the announcement of its target of saving two billion dollars, the company began laying off two thousand employees last week, one hundred of which were employees of CBS News. Layoffs primarily targeted the Race and Culture unit and CBS’s streaming services (CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evenings Plus), multiple outlets reported. Among those laid off was Debora Patta, a senior foreign correspondent who had been reporting on Gaza for the network. Its Saturday morning program will also undergo format changes, The Guardian reported. One laid-off staffer from CBS Evenings Plus posted on social media that every producer on the team that was laid off was a person of color, and that everyone who was relocated was white. A veteran producer who was likewise laid off confirmed to CJR that this was true. 

• Last Tuesday, federal officials ordered two Capital News Service reporters to leave immigration hearings in Hyattsville, Maryland—and barred them from returning until they received permission from the Trump administration, whose designated public-information official had been furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. “If the press can’t access immigration hearings at a time like this, then the press isn’t free,” said Jolene Ivey, an at-large member of the county council in Prince George’s County, where the court is based. In the days that followed, the Capital News Service asked to be let back in; by Friday morning, the decision was reversed.  

• Popular Substack writers are leaving for Patreon. “I don’t want to be deeply invested in a platform whose business model is rooted in snagging readers through algorithmic manipulation,” Anne Helen Petersen, of Culture Study, wrote to her subscribers. “I don’t want to make money for founders who refuse to draw a line about platforming hate speech.” Lyz Lenz and Virginia Sole-Smith have made the same move. Much has changed for the newsletter ecosystem in the past few years, but, as Clio Chang observed in a 2020 profile of Substack for CJR, its founders never claimed that “Substack will ‘save’ media—a promise that’s bound to disappoint.” Chang wrote: “Will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business.”

• Bloomberg is launching Disclosure, a podcast about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The investigative reporter Jason Leopold will cohost the show alongside First Amendment lawyer Matt Topic. Together, they will delve into the “wild backstories” behind some of Leopold’s FOIA requests, the “lawsuits that ensued,” and the “document dumps that made it all worth it.” New episodes will be released every Tuesday. 

• Matt Mercer, the North Carolina Republican Party’s communications director, told a ProPublica reporter that he would “strongly suggest” dropping a story about Paul Newby, the GOP-affiliated chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court. “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter,” Mercer, who claims the publication is waging a “jihad” against North Carolina Republicans, wrote in an email. On Friday, the story went up anyway, and Mercer posted on X to express his disapproval. “Feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper,” he wrote. 

• And Blikk, Hungary’s most widely circulated daily newspaper, has fallen into the hands of businessmen in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political circles. On Friday, Ringier AG, the paper’s Swiss parent company, announced the sale of its Hungarian division, which consists of Blikk and multiple other titles, to the Indamedia Network, a conglomerate that controls Hungary’s top news website, Index, and commercial TV channel TV2, both of which are staunchly pro-government in their coverage. Over the past fifteen years, similar takeovers have left more than 80 percent of all Hungarian news outlets in the control of government-friendly owners. Experts worry that a similar fate awaits Blikk at a crucial time, as Hungarians head to the polls to decide the Orbán regime’s fate in April.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the sourcing around Hamdi’s explanation of his remarks and correct the timing of Evan Gershkovich’s detention. We regret the errors.

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