(RNS) — When I saw far-right influencer Laura Loomer’s post announcing that Sami Hamdi had been detained by U.S. authorities, I brushed it off as another burst of online noise. Surely, I thought, it was a visa issue — an administrative hiccup that, worst-case scenario, would end with him back on a plane to London. Sami is a frequent visitor to the United States, well known among Washington policymakers, a guest on major networks, where he offered analysis that even those who disagree can respect.
But as the hours passed and his family and legal team confirmed what was happening, the story grew darker. This was not a denial of entry or an overstayed visa. The U.S. government was transferring a respected journalist and analyst to one of its horrid Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities. They were not quietly sending him home. They were making a spectacle of it.
Most disturbing is why they have chosen Hamdi. He has been among the most vocal Muslim analysts condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza. His detention fits into the repression of Muslim and Palestinian voices who have refused to stay silent while bombs still fall and American-sponsored Israeli apartheid still grows.
Just a month ago, I wrote about a decorated community leader and servant of over three decades, Marwan Marouf, who was seized outside of his son’s school on Sept. 22 by seven ICE vehicles. No criminal record. Only certificates, proclamations and awards for public service. That morning, we heard of a man who had built bridges across every faith and civic line being treated like a fugitive.
A few weeks later, they came for Yaakub Ira, a legal DACA recipient who had filmed our gatherings in support of Marwan. And now Sami, a voice for humanity that has been precious to our community.
These are not isolated arrests. They are a choreography of humiliation. A message. A ritual in which Muslim and pro-Palestinian names are publicly dragged through the machinery of “national security” as if to remind us of our conditional place in this country.
Some of those detained earlier, such as Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, have been released. But the action against Marwan and Sami, and the continued detention of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian American protester swept up in March and still being held in Texas, show that the administration is still using immigration status to silence legitimate voices. (I’ve visited Leqaa, Marwan and Yaakub, and they all are concerned about each other, even though none of them knew each other. Because that’s how humans are supposed to be.)
For years, many have tried to believe that ICE’s brutality was an aberration — that the raids, the families torn apart, the endless dehumanization were excesses, not essence. But the truth is harder to swallow. ICE was built this way.
The Department of Homeland Security, born from the post-9/11 era, came to have Islamophobia as its organizing principle. Muslim charities were shuttered, travelers interrogated for their faith, mosques infiltrated and entire communities surveilled. ICE was one of the branches that grew from that poisoned root.
Now, two decades later, it’s not just the undocumented or asylum-seekers who must look over their shoulders. It’s the journalist, the analyst, the community volunteer — the Palestinian whose voice has grown too strong or who is too visible. The architecture of fear that was built for us is being reactivated against us, this time in broad daylight.
It is easy, especially for those outside our faith community, to file these cases under “immigration issues.” But that misses the moral gravity. These are not policy disputes; they are acts of public degradation. ICE has chosen to detain men whose lives are woven into the civic fabric of America — leaders, servants, sons — because it can. Because in the public imagination, “Muslim” and “Palestinian” still equate to “suspect.”
The truth is, we are living through a new wave of Islamophobia — only the names and faces have changed. It’s no longer the talk-radio host or the fringe activist. It’s the bureaucrat with a badge, the agency that hides cruelty behind procedure. The rest of us, meanwhile, are told to stay calm, to trust the process, to believe that the system will sort itself out.
But what if the system is the problem?
What if ICE — from its inception — was never about border control or public safety, but about disciplining the “other”? What if this is not a malfunction but a function?
For years, I’ve written and spoken about the slow normalization of Islamophobia — how it migrates from hate speech to policy, from policy to practice, and from practice to silence. The detention of Sami Hamdi is not just about one man. It is the culmination of a story that began in the fearful aftermath of 9/11 and has been maturing ever since.
The government may want to make an example out of Sami Hamdi, to silence a voice that refuses to flatter power. Instead, they have again made an example of themselves. And we will continue to fight for the freedom of all in a land that is becoming synonymous with anything but that.
