Archive October 31, 2025

California’s Santa Barbara – A local volunteer, Aubrie Lugo, walked down a suburban sidewalk with a stack of flyers on a warm Saturday afternoon.

She said she felt compelled to take part in the campaign to pass a statewide measure known as Proposition 50 despite that it was her first political knock-on.

As she perused homes full of Halloween decorations, Lugo said, “It feels like a dire situation.” We’re attempting to combat tampering with our democracy.

Proposition 50 will appear on California’s November 4 ballot, but whether it succeeds or fails will have an impact on elections after 2025.

Californians have a choice in the outcome of the congressional map, which was created to give the Democratic Party five more seats in the US House of Representatives.

The move, according to supporters, is necessary to thwart other Republican initiatives nationwide. Proposition 50 would allegedly stifle the voice of California Republicans in Congress, according to opponents.

Both parties have argued that the fight for democracy and fair representation has been framed in their campaigns.

The midterm elections in 2026, in which House of Representatives control is in jeopardy, are likely to have a significant impact on the results of Tuesday’s vote.

The chamber’s current Republican Party majority is likely to be a vote on President Trump’s second term in office.

Trump has successfully pushed for the creation of partisan maps in Republican strongholds like Texas to aid in maintaining control of the House majority.

The California ballot initiative, which was intended as a response, has already attracted national attention and drawn attention from all over the state. Trump has praised the importance of the vote while his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, praised its significance.

In a social media post in favor of the measure, Obama declared that “this vote will have crucial implications.” Not just for California, but for the entire nation as well.

Texas as a response

In mid-August, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, asserted that Democrats could not afford to “unilaterally disarm” while Republican states pursue partisan congressional districts.

In response to what is happening in Texas, Newsom said, “We’re asking the voters for their permission to do midterm redistricting in 2026, 2028, and 2030 for the congressional maps.”

Proposition 50 was based in Texas. In June, it became apparent that the Trump administration was quietly urging southern state legislators to redraw their congressional districts in advance of the crucial midterm elections in 2026.

Each district elects its own representative for the Congress. And a few votes in the House of Representatives could help or derail a bill because the margins are so tight.

Republicans currently control only 6 of the 219 seats, compared to Democrats, who only hold 6 of them.

The Republican-controlled Texas legislature eventually approved a new congressional map drawn in part to defy Democratic voters and gain Republican seats after Democrats feared the midterm elections.

North Carolina and Missouri, two red-leaning states, have also made progress with their own initiatives.

Many people think that California’s ballot measure will determine whether Democrats will support Trump’s attempts to reform the electoral landscape, even if it means using tactics they might otherwise oppose.

All other Republican states will act similarly if the Democratic states don’t respond to what Texas did, according to Doug Allard, a 77-year-old Goleta resident who voted in favor.

The nonpartisan commission should be stopped?

However, California’s state legislature cannot simply cast a new congressional map.

Because California voters assigned that task to a nonpartisan group called the Citizens Redistricting Commission, which creates maps with a focus on proportional representation in the 2010 election.

The commission wouldn’t be eliminated by the ballot measure in November. However, it would hold off on doing anything until 2030 and switch to a different map created by the legislature.

Fewer California Republicans would be elected to Congress as a result.

According to Samuel Wang, the Princeton Gerrymandering Project director, “California had nine districts in the last election decided by a margin of less than seven points.” There will only be one district that is that close, according to our estimation if Prop 50 is passed.

The nonpartisan commission’s work would resume in five years, according to the campaign in favor of Prop 50.

California will abandon the measure if Texas abandons its partisan map, according to Newsom.

The new legislative map will have a vote on whether or not California voters will approve it, which Texas voters did not do.

These caveats are thought to be crucial in attracting California voters, who might ordinarily view gerrymandering as anti-democratic. Prior to now, California had praised the nonpartisan commission as a case study of fair redistricting.

A national conflict

Proposition 50 has also been used as a necessary bulwark against a Republican takeover thanks to advertising campaigns starring national figures like Obama and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ocasio-Cortez framed the vote as a part of a “fight for democracy in all 50 states” by saying “Prop 50 leveled the playing field and gave power back to the people”.

However, opponents of the ballot measure worry that it will give local and state politicians more control over how districts are voted in order to win over more people.

Additionally, according to experts like Wang, the measure demonstrates a conflict between protecting fair representation at the local and federal levels.

If the policies you support at a national level are stacked against them, Wang said, “The argument is that it is of no use to have a fairly elected representative from your district.”

He observed that Proposition 50’s discussion often centers on issues in national politics, with Proposition 50 supporters largely in opposition to Trump’s policies.

According to Wang, “It seems to me that voters are viewing this from a national perspective.”

Tit-for-tat escalation

Some critics also expressed concern about the dangers of Democrats and Republicans using tit-for-tat tactics consistently.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has long led anti-gerrymandering initiatives, is one of the most prominent voices calling on voters to reject Proposition 50.

“The United States is in a war,” the president said. Who can cheat the other person the most? During a recent TV interview, Arnold Schwarzenegger said something.

“Texas started it,” he said. They committed a terrible mistake. California suddenly says, “Well, then we have to do something terribly wrong.” Then, other states are jumped in.

Nonpartisan reforms at the national level might be a way to de-escalate the redistricting debate, Wang believes. Such reforms would prevent individual states from generating maps that favor one party or another.

According to Wang, “There is a lot of evidence that independent commissions produce fairer maps than legislatures do.”

Nonpartisan redistricting would have previously been a part of the legislation that had been introduced by Democratic lawmakers, but those efforts failed to win Republican support. In the current political climate, rising tensions could make such an effort even more unlikely.

The Trump administration announced earlier this week that it would send federal officials to California to “monitor” irregularities during the November 4 election. The announcement, according to Newsom, was intended to stifle voter intimidation and cast doubt on the results.

Trump has a long history of aggressively disseminating conspiracy theories, particularly in light of his own election-related defeat in the 2020 presidential election. That rhetoric was used to support a number of violent maneuvers to deny the election results.

Voters cited the Trump administration’s actions as their justification for voting “yes” on Prop 50, including Hank, a 77-year-old California resident who requested that his last name not be used.

Two immigrants detained in Chicago, Illinois, have filed a class-action lawsuit against senior DHS employees, alleging they received unfair treatment and denied legal counsel.

The US rights watchdog, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), released the lawsuit’s (PDF) PDF on Friday.

Since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown earlier this year, it highlights the worsening conditions at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.

According to Alexa Van Brunt, director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office and lead counsel on the lawsuit, “everyone has the right to access counsel and not be subject to horrific and inhumane conditions.”

“Community members are being abducted off the streets, locked up in hold cells, denied access to basic necessities, medical care, and legal rights, and forced to renounce them.”

The defendants, Felipe Agustin Zamacona and Pablo Moreno Gonzalez, have been living in the United States for more than 30 years as immigrants. Both are currently being held inside the Broadview facility.

Senior Trump officials, including ICE Director Todd Lyons and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, are named defendants in their lawsuit.

The most recent complaint alleges abuse and neglect in immigration facilities. In August, a similar class-action lawsuit was brought against the Trump administration, highlighting the detention facility in New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza.

The Broadview facility, a two-story office building that serves as ICE’s “primary processing facility” in the Chicago area, is the subject of Friday’s complaint, which zooms in on the complaint.

However, the two immigrants’ attorneys contend that the facility’s capacity to house them outweighs its own.

Nearly 5, 202 people were detained at Broadview between January and July of this year, according to the lawsuit’s ICE data. At any given time, the facility has at least 200 people inside.

Since the Trump administration launched Operation Midway Blitz on September 8, the numbers have increased. Midway Blitz, which Noem and the Department of Homeland Security spearheaded, was intended to increase immigration arrests in Chicago.

According to the class action, that push has put strain on the Broadview facility. It states that while Broadview was intended to be a “holding facility” for short-term detention, it is now being used for “warehousing people” for “days on end.”

According to the lawsuit, ICE officers allegedly held eight women for at least a day in an isolation room intended for singles.

“Broadview’s overcrowding is so extreme that people are forced to stand in cramped conditions due to the increased number of immigration arrests during Operation Midway Blitz.” Detainees are frequently unable to lie down on the floor.

Additionally, it includes cockroach and centipede infestations, overflowing toilets, and rooms with bodily fluid on the walls.

One anonymous woman is quoted as saying in the lawsuit, “We told the guards that the place was at full capacity, but they kept bringing people inside.” No one treats their pets like that, so they treated us like animals, or worse than animals.

Additionally, the lawsuit claims that detainees have been denied access to clean, safe, and adequate medical care.

The complaint claims that the conversations took place in a central location where federal officers were able to listen in, despite the fact that some detainees have been given the option to call or text their families for a brief while.

According to the lawsuit, some detainees have been denied access to outside communication completely, and access to religious institutions has been restricted for both lawyers and religious leaders.

Federal representatives are also prohibited from entering immigration facilities, according to the lawsuit, which includes members of Congress who are tasked with overseeing them.

“An attorney’s access is not a privilege.” Nate Eimer, a partner at the law firm Eimer Stahl and co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in a statement that this is a right.

“We can debate immigration policy, but it is not about denying people legal rights and keeping them inhumanely and unlawfully detained.”

The Trump administration has consistently refuted allegations of ICE facility abuse.

However, as abuse reports increase, Operation Midway Blitz has been closely watched since its launch.

Advocates accuse the aggressive immigration operation, which is frequently carried out by armed, masked agents, of demonstrating a “pattern of extreme brutality.”

When she received a text message that altered everything, Soumaya Hamdi was planning the family trip she would soon be taking with her husband. “Is it true that Sami is being abducted”? a friend contacted.

She called her husband, British-Tunisian journalist Sami Hamdi, earlier that day to check in on him while he was on a speaking engagement in Israel’s Gaza war. When he didn’t answer, Soumaya had assumed he was at a speaking engagement.

Instead, he had been detained by US immigration authorities, news that came as “a complete shock”, she told Al Jazeera.

She continued, “I don’t believe anyone ever wants to read that text message.”

October 26 was Sunday. Sami had been stopped at San Francisco International Airport. His visa was suspended by US authorities two days prior following a campaign by anti-Muslim and pro-Israel social media influencers.

His lawyers filed urgent petitions against his detention and his wife, British parliamentarians, and UK civil society organizations, all calling for the government to take action following his arrest 35-year-old critic of Israel’s genocide against Gaza.

His case is the latest in what Muslim advocacy groups describe as a campaign to silence pro-Palestinian voices in the US through immigration enforcement.

“Bundled into a black van,” the phrase.

Since the US war on Gaza first started in October 2023, Hamdi’s speech tour was just his most recent across the country. Since then, pro-Palestinians and American Muslims have gained more followers for his message of continuing support for the Palestinian people.

On Saturday evening, he addressed the annual gala of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil right advocacy group, in Sacramento and was due to speak at another CAIR event in Florida the next day.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers approached him as he passed through the domestic terminal at the airport in San Francisco on Sunday morning.

According to Soumaya, “They took him to a big black van,” quoting what her husband later said when she reached him. “He asked them, and this must have been the second or third time, he said, ‘ I need to be able to tell someone that I’ve been taken by ICE. ‘ They responded, “OK, you got one text message. “

Before officers took his phone, Hamdi managed to leave a brief message to CAIR. When Soumaya later called, an ICE officer answered and hung up on her.

She claimed that the officer “hung me up” before turning the phone off.

Hamdi finally managed to call his wife for 30 seconds from the Californian airport’s Golden State Annex, which is located about five to six hours away, around midnight.

“He sounded really under pressure”, Soumaya recalled.

Days later, she claimed, authorities interrogated him without his lawyers present and transferred him to a different facility for processing before returning him.

Since his detention, she has spoken with him twice.

The couple have three children, including a 10-month-old baby. Soumaya said, “The kids can’t reach him because they can’t.” “Sami is a family man,” he says.

Legal challenge

A federal habeas corpus petition was filed on Tuesday by CAIR’s California chapter, which called for the government to justify Hamdi’s detention as well as an urgent temporary restraining order to stop the move.

The filings aim to prevent Hamdi from being moved to a far-off place, according to CAIR, which could ensnare him from his friends and lawyers.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Hamdi “cheered on” the October 7 Hamas-led attacks, while the spokesperson for the DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, said, “Those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country”.

Hamdi said, “Don’t pity them [the Palestinians], they don’t want your pity, celebrate their victory,” in an edited clip shared by MEMRI, a pro-Israel organization that claims to be an extremism monitor, to support his detention.

Hamdi clarified his remarks a week later and on numerous occasions thereafter. “What Muslims are celebrating is not war, they’re celebrating the revival of a cause – a just cause”, Hamdi told The Thinking Muslim podcast a week after October 7. In Hamdi’s own words, “Racism, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, genocide, and war crimes need no justifications for humanity to recognize them and stand steadfast against them” have his family remarked.

Soumaya criticized the accusations made against her husband as “outrageous” and “smear campaigns that targeted his support for Palestinian rights.”

“The reason why these allegations have been made about Sami is because he’s become too effective of a speaker”, said Soumaya. He claims that the American government should not send billions to help Israel when American citizens require housing and healthcare. This is not to say that he has been criticizing the United States or a foreign government, and that is unfair.

Sami’s father, Mohamed El-Hachmi Hamdi, wrote an open letter to Vice President JD Vance, saying that his son should be encouraged, not stymied, and prohibited from entering America.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area office, which assembled Hamdi’s legal defence, told Al Jazeera the challenge aims to protect Hamdi’s constitutional rights.

No charges have been brought against Sami, she said, referring to far-right activists who claimed credit for his detention, despite what Laura Loomer, Amy Mekelberg, and various government accounts have been tweeting.

Billoo compared Hamdi’s case to those of other foreign pro-Palestine advocates detained by ICE, including Badar Khan Suri, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil.

The Trump administration has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law being broadly interpreted to allow the government to target foreign nationals whose speech it deems harmful to US foreign policy.

Hassan Ahmad, an immigration lawyer who represents Sami and has handled similar cases like Suri’s, claimed this shows “a broad crackdown on Palestinian advocacy through immigration law.”

He claimed that there is “distinct but frequently overlap between anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, and we’ve seen that more since October.” This is part of the larger problem of de jure Islamophobia in the US justice system”.

Billoo claimed that “this is using immigration to spread structural anti-Palestinian racism.”

Following the onset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which “increased to levels we hadn’t seen before,” Billoo continued, CAIR was concerned about the rise in Islamophobia.

According to CAIR’s latest civil rights report, the organisation received a record 8, 658 complaints in 2024, the highest since it began compiling data in 1996.

The report attributed the rise to what it called “the US-backed genocide,” which “drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,” with complaints spanning hate crimes, education, law enforcement encounters, and employment discrimination.

The new report from the US human rights organization Common Dreams, Solidarity as a Crime, highlights the “nationwide campaign to silence solidarity” with Palestinians across the country, citing censorship, arrests, campus crackdowns, and deportations aimed at pro-Palestinian advocacy.

‘ Wholly inadequate ‘ UK response

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) “is in touch with his family and the local authorities” as it stated to Al Jazeera.

However, Soumaya called the response “wholly inadequate.” She said US authorities are “blocking” FCDO officials from receiving information about why Hamdi’s visa was revoked.

She said, “We’re talking about a British citizen who has already been given the right to enter the US.” The FCDO ought to acknowledge that this is “absolutely alarming.”

Five UK members of parliament, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, issued a statement last week calling on the government to secure consular access and demand Hamdi’s safe return.

He was also requested by the National Union of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists. There is no proof that a journalist has committed a terrorist offence, according to Seamus Dooley, assistant general secretary of the NUJ, and he should be released.

The Muslim Council of Britain urged the government to take “urgent diplomatic action”, saying, “Press freedom cannot be selective and we urge the British Government to come to the defence of its citizens being detained in this manner”.

Billoo emphasized that there are risks that go beyond just one person. We are all forced to wonder: Are we safe if the US government treats a prominent political analyst, journalist, and British citizen in this manner. What can we say”?

His wife claims that the family has been devastated by the arrest. When he travels, Simi misses the kids. He misses all of his family”, Soumaya said. His parents worry a lot about his well-being, too, and his mom and dad are.