Sami Hamdi was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at San Francisco International Airport on 26 October
A British political commentator who was held in US immigration custody for more than two weeks has described the squalid conditions he experienced in a California detention facility.
Sami Hamdi was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at San Francisco International Airport in California on 26 October after travelling to the country for a speaking tour about US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
He spent the next 18 days in a detention facility, sleeping in a hall with around 90 other people also facing deportation as part of the US Government’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
After a battle in the courts, Hamdi was released earlier this week and allowed to return to the UK, landing in London on Thursday.
Speaking to The i Paper, he described how he was first approached at San Francisco International Airport by an official from Homeland Security, who informed him that his visa had been revoked two days previously, without giving a reason.
“Then, suddenly, four other officers surrounded me,” Hamdi said. The 35-year-old was escorted to a black car with tinted windows, handcuffed and driven to a processing centre half an hour away, then transferred to a cell inside a custody van.
After a two-hour drive, he arrived at the the Golden State Annex, a privately-run former prison in McFarland that now serves as California’s largest migrant detention facility, with space for up to 2,560 individuals.
Inmates are held in large halls, where they sleep alongside each other in bunkbeds.
“It was clearly overcrowded,” Hamdi said. “There were more than 90 people but not enough pillows, enough blankets and the like.”
“The other inmates immediately rushed to me and said ‘listen, the food here is terrible. It’s going to make you really sick.’”
After eating a meal he described as “slop” that evening, Hamdi woke at 5am with an “agonising” pain in his left side. “I genuinely believed I burst a kidney or something, or that I’d messed my spleen up,” he said.
Hamdi said his request for a doctor was ignored for three hours until his wife alerted the media to his condition.
“The inmates said that anyone who enters the facility suffers the same pain I suffered in the first two weeks,” he added. “I’m not expecting fresh food in a prison facility, but it certainly looked off.”
In July, NBC news reported that immigration lawyers had received several complaints from clients held in detention facilities across California, about the food being “inedible” and in one case “mouldy.”
California’s detention centres are run by The GEO Group XXX
Hamdi was placed in shackles and driven to an ICE facility in Fresno, a city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, on three occasions to be shown documentation relating to his case.
In Fresno, he said he was held in a cramped room with around 20 other detainees for up to 24 hours at a time before being seen by officials.
“There was a stone bench or the hard floor. They just tell you, ‘sleep here until Ice come in the morning’.”
Detainees were forced to share an open toilet, Hamdi said. “You can smell it across the whole cell… honestly, I could not believe it was America,” he said.
Hamdi faced a single allegation of overstaying his visa, which had been revoked without his knowledge days prior to his detention.
The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has accused him of supporting terrorism, sharing a video by the pro-Israel organisation Memri, in which Hamdi appeared to praise the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, calling on his audience to not “pity” Palestinians but to “celebrate their victory”.
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Hamdi insists his views were misrepresented by the edited montage, and that he condemned violence at the same speaking engagement the clips were taken from.
The California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair-CA), whose lawyers challenged Hamdi’s detention in federal court, said he was held due to his support for Palestine and “punished for criticising Israel, not for any alleged wrongdoing”.
On Monday, they reached an agreement with the US Government that Hamdi would leave the country voluntarily.
Hamdi said he is allowed to apply for a new visa and plans to return to the US with nothing on his record.
“The Federal court system still works”, he added. “Federal judges still take seriously the issue of freedom of speech, and there is a growing perception amongst Americans that their freedom of speech is under attack. I think that worked in my favour.
“If you’re prepared to ride out that pressure, then most certainly, and this is the point I made, eventually you win. The issue is whether you have the stomach to go through it.”
Asked whether anyone who had publicly expressed pro-Palestinian views should be concerned about travelling to the US, Hamdi said: “I think they should be aware that there is a possibility that there would be a similar situation.”
