“The targeting of immigrants, the targeting of Muslim communities—we’ve seen this rhetoric climb over the past several months and I anticipate it getting worse,” Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who is a Democrat, told the Washington Post. “The fact that we do not have a strong counterresponse from [Democratic] elected officials at all levels of government is the most frightening, especially when the vitriol is coming from the highest office in the world. Communities are looking for people with courage, people with a backbone, who are willing to stand up.”
Despite Dearborn having a Democratic mayor, let’s take a moment to revisit the Michigan city’s own choices.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud
In 2020, the U.S.’s first Arab-majority city backed Joe Biden with 69% of the vote. Four years later, only 36% of the city’s voters supported Kamala Harris. Forty-two percent voted for Donald Trump. Another 18%went with Jill Stein. Although nationally only 10% of Muslims who voted for Biden in 2020 voted for Trump in 2024.
And the city didn’t just help deliver Trump’s victory, they celebrated it. Politico captured it with a headline that needed no embellishment: “Dearborn’s Arab Americans feel vindicated by Harris’ loss.”
They weren’t just vindicated. “They feel like they’ve been redeemed,” Dearborn City Council President Michael Sareini told Politico. “They wanted to send a message and they did.” Message delivered.
A local activist even described the results as “we became much more politically mature.” But “maturity” apparently meant voting for the candidate who wants to expel Gazans and stamp his own ego into the rubble with golden monuments.
Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News, put it plainly.
“They didn’t vote for Trump because they believe Trump is the best candidate,” he said. “No, they voted for Trump because they want to punish the Democrats and Harris.”
And punish them they did.
So why are the same people now demanding that Democrats rescue them from the very consequences of the outcome they helped create? Why are they pleading for protection from the man they empowered?
It’s not just contradictory. It undermines their own stated cause. They aren’t directing their protest energy at President Donald Trump or Vice President JD Vance—the two men who have backed ethnic cleansing in Gaza. They’re not mobilizing against the actual federal power targeting immigrant and Muslim communities. Instead, they are protesting Democrats who currently have no power to stop any of it.
That isn’t a strategy. It’s a tantrum on top of the last tantrum.
Civil rights activists didn’t march only in cities that had already integrated. Pro-immigration groups don’t target sanctuary-city mayors. Pro-choice activists don’t limit their rallies to states protecting abortion rights. Successful movements confront the source of the harm, not the nearest soft target.
If “political maturity” is truly the goal, then it starts with choosing effective targets and owning the consequences of political decisions. Don’t hand the keys to a man promising to do exactly what he did the first time around, except worse. And don’t go running to the very people you worked to defeat, demanding they clean up the mess.
That’s not courage. That’s not conviction. It’s just sad.
