British journalist Sami Hamdi reunited with family after release from Ice detention

British journalist and political commentator Sami Hamdi has been reunited with his family after being released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.

Hamdi arrived in London on Thursday, three weeks after being detained by Ice agents while on a speaking tour in the US. 

Hamdi and the US government reached an agreement during a hearing on Monday that he would leave the States voluntarily.

"What they want is to ensure that people like us don’t go to America," he told the Guardian after arriving in London.

"And we will defy them and we will exert our constitutional rights and speak truth against hatred."

He had arrived in the US on 19 October on a valid visitor visa for a speaking tour, but his visa was revoked on 24 October without his knowledge and without being informed by immigration authorities, according to Zahraa Billo, executive director for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair-SFBA).

Hamdi was accused by Ice agents of overstaying his visa on 26 October while he was at San Francisco International Airport.

He was then transferred to Golden State Annex in McFarland, California, where he was kept in a cell with around 80 other people.

He said he was denied medical care for severe abdominal pain until his condition was reported in the media. 

US 'trying to curb freedom of speech'

Hamdi was not charged with any criminal conduct or on national security grounds despite allegations by the Department of Homeland Security on X that he supports terrorism and actively undermines the “safety of Americans”.

Billo told Middle East Eye that Hamdi was approached and detained by Ice agents in the airport's domestic terminal. 

“He was travelling between San Francisco and Florida, so this is not a border stop. This was a domestic trip. He had already gone through TSA [Transportation Security Administration] at the time," Billo said.

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil files $20m claim against Trump administration

Read More »

Hamdi said: "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 added that the US government is "trying to curb freedom of speech because there’s a concern among the extremist Israeli lobby that American public opinion is shifting".

His detention is the latest episode in a series of detentions of students and journalists.

Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, Columbia University graduate and permanent US resident Mahmoud Khalil, and Georgetown University postdoctoral scholar Badar Khan Suri were all detained by Ice earlier this year for their pro-Palestinian activism. None were charged with a crime. 

Columbia University students Yunseo Chung and Ranjani Srinivasan were also targeted by Ice.

Srinivasan left the US on her own volition after she was informed that her student visa had been revoked. She had been arrested and released in a police raid the evening that students occupied Hamilton Hall and renamed it “Hind’s Hall” - after six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab who went missing in Gaza and was later found killed along with several of her relatives and two paramedics who tried to save her. They appeared to have come under fire from Israeli tanks.