A former senior Labour adviser close to No 10 insisted he still loved America after he succeeded in blocking the Trump administration’s attempts to deport him over Christmas.
Imran Ahmed, 47, was preparing Christmas dinner at his house in Washington when he learnt this week that he had been sanctioned by the administration.
Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), had angered Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, with his campaign to stop social media platforms promoting harmful material.
• How Imran Ahmed’s fight against ‘digital hate’ crossed Trump allies
After learning of the plans to deport him, the Mancunian quickly assembled a formidable legal team and succeeded in obtaining a temporary order from a US judge on Christmas Eve, preventing his arrest.
Ahmed said the United States remained his home. He said: “My wife is American. My child is American and I will do what anyone else would do this moment, which is fight first of all to preserve my family life.
“I love America. I really do. I’ve always loved it. I wrote my dissertation at Cambridge on American politics. I don’t say these things performatively when I say that this is a country that has constitutional innovation — the idea that ‘we the people’ make the laws, that there is no locus of power without checks or balances, and that’s how we protect against tyranny — that is deeply meaningful to me. I believe in this system.”
Ahmed said that the judge’s ruling late on Christmas Eve showed that the American system was still working. “It was the best of America,” he added.
Announcing the US plans to sanction Ahmed and Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that the administration would not tolerate “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship”.
Marco Rubio
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Ahmed, a friend of Morgan McSweeney, said that the sanctioning was “retaliatory for our work holding AI and social media companies to account”.
He added: “I felt determined to defeat these specious arguments, trying specifically to recast our work — which in recent months exposed how AI platforms are happy to tell a 13-year-old child how to cut themselves and draft suicide notes for them — as censorship. That’s outrageous to me.
In a post on Christmas Eve, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, appeared to mock the ex-Labour aide’s ties to No 10, responding to a post highlighting his links to McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, with a festive emoji.
Morgan McSweeney, the No 10 chief of staff
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Ahmed questioned whether the State Department was “working at the behest of Elon Musk”. He said: “They don’t like being held accountable. I’ve always shown a willingness to stand up when I see injustice and to take it on.”
This year, a California judge dismissed a legal case brought by X against CCDH’s scraping of data from the social media platform to use for its research.
Ahmed said that the Trump administration’s criticism of Britain’s commitment to free speech was “incredibly confusing”.
He added: “The United Kingdom’s only action on social media has been to announce an investigation, triggered by CCDH’s work, into the proliferation of antisemitism … after the attack on the synagogue in Manchester just five miles from where I personally grew up. That, of course, is a shared priority of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Just a few days ago, the newly appointed antisemitism tsar in the State Department, Yehuda Kaploun, talked about how important it was to take on online antisemitism and to hold platforms accountable. He said he was putting pressure on those platforms himself.”
Despite being thrown into a complex legal battle to remain in the US, Ahmed said he would now enjoy some mince pies and spend time with his infant daughter over Christmas.
“I’ll be spending time with loved friends, doing exactly what we’re meant to do on Christmas, celebrating the things we’re grateful for,” he said. “Which are primarily mince pies and my daughter.”