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Amer Ghalib has made a lot of national news as the leader of a small, Midwestern city.
His election in 2021 as mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., was itself a headline. Mr. Ghalib, who is from Yemen, became the first Arab American and first Muslim to govern the city. And he was working with what was believed to be the first all-Muslim City Council in the country.
Two years later, Mr. Ghalib created another stir when he and other socially conservative Muslims banned the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag from publicly owned flagpoles, alarming liberals who said the move was discriminatory and harmful to the city’s welcoming reputation.
Their fears only heightened last month, after Mr. Ghalib endorsed Donald J. Trump, who as president had ushered in what is known as the Muslim ban, blocking immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations, including Mr. Ghalib’s home country. Adding to the tensions was a visit by Mr. Trump, who hoped the mayor’s support could peel off a meaningful number of Muslim voters in Michigan, a swing state.
Explaining his support, Mr. Ghalib pointed to a distaste for liberal social views, anger at President Biden’s support of Israel and a belief that Mr. Trump will end the conflict in the Middle East.
In Hamtramck (pronounced “ham-tram-ick”), many longtime liberal residents, including members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, say they were dejected.
Over the years, they had actively encouraged the city of 30,000 residents, just north of downtown Detroit, to welcome immigrants. When Muslims won a majority of seats in the six-member City Council in 2015, they cheered the change as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant rhetoric used by Mr. Trump.
They had not expected this outcome.
In this election year, when immigration has been debated, distorted and vilified, Hamtramck offers an example of how the issue can cut in politically complex and surprising ways. The city’s longtime residents, committed to diversity and liberal values, celebrated the newcomers. But Mr. Ghalib, along with some other immigrants, brought to Hamtramck their own principles, priorities and ambitions.
Mr. Ghalib, in particular, found more in common with MAGA Republicans, who actively courted him, than with Democrats.
“Languages and cultural distinctions create their own barriers,” said Saeed Khan, a professor of Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.
“In Hamtramck, you have people from Bangladesh who have a particular cultural perspective, as do the Yemenis, as do the Bosnians,” he said. “And because their experiences as immigrant communities differ so widely, that plays out on the streets when it comes to civic and political engagement.”
On the surface, Hamtramck’s infighting is hard to see.
It is a humble place. Working class. In every neighborhood within the city’s two square miles, people of all backgrounds live side by side, their narrow homes packed tightly together like well-worn novels on a bookshelf.
The Muslim call to prayer mixes easily in the air with church bells. Women in hijabs buy potato pancakes at a Polish restaurant, and tattooed hipsters eat murtabak — bread stuffed with beef, tomatoes and onions — at a Yemeni cafe.
Karen Majewski, the former mayor, is partly responsible for the city’s vibe.
In 2004, she was sworn into the City Council as part of a liberal movement wresting government control from a long-established, Polish American power base that was solidly Democratic, but also more socially conservative. Elected mayor in 2005, she maintained control for 16 years and was the last of a continuous, century-old line of ethnic Poles to hold the office.
In an interview at her home, Ms. Majewski recalled how white progressives in Hamtramck welcomed Arabs and Muslims with open arms. Today, the city swells with Muslims from Yemen, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Albania. About a quarter of residents have roots in Yemen. Nearly another quarter are from Bangladesh.
“This was part of Hamtramck’s identity,” she said. “We’ve always prided ourselves on immigration as a source of our identity and distinctness, on being a place that welcomed people from all over the world.”
In the early 2000s, Ms. Majewski was a member of the City Hall leadership that codified the right of mosques to broadcast the call to prayer outdoors, for all to hear.
After Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election with a promise to get tough on immigration, Ms. Majewski, as mayor, posted a message underscoring that Hamtramck would remain a safe place for everyone. “And most specifically,” Ms. Majewski recalled, “the Muslim community.”
When Mr. Trump announced the Muslim ban in 2017, liberals in Hamtramck were part of local protests.
How do she and her friends feel now that their Yemeni-born mayor has gotten behind the former president?
“Disillusioned, pissed off,” Ms. Majewski said. “There’s a lot of outrage and a lot of disgust.”
Later, she noted that liberals have largely stopped going to City Council meetings because their voices were not being adequately heard. “The feeling is pretty much, why bother?” she said.
For his part, Mr. Ghalib, 44, said he hoped his endorsement, and Mr. Trump’s visit, would “help the Muslim community come together and stop negative rhetoric toward Republicans.”
But shortly after the mayor’s endorsement, Mohammed Hassan, a city councilman and a leader within the city’s Bangladeshi Muslim community, publicly backed Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Hassan rallied two others from the City Council to the cause. He also held a Harris rally, filling a local restaurant with dozens of Muslim voters.
The councilman noted he works with the mayor on many issues. But not this time. He vowed to energize most Bengalis to vote for Ms. Harris, while picking off votes from the mayor’s base. “One-third of Yemenis listen to me all the time,” Mr. Hassan said.
Democratic policies, he said, help the poor and middle class, while Mr. Trump scapegoats immigrants. Mr. Hassan also believes Ms. Harris would better handle negotiations over the war in the Middle East, partly because of her composure: “She is not crazy like him,” he said.
Mr. Ghalib has been the center of controversy before, mainly over social media posts that he now disavows or says were taken out of context by liberals.
He told The Times that he began turning toward Republicans when, as mayor, he faced bitter division in his city over social issues, mainly over L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
He noted that in 2022, he stood behind conservative Muslim parents who complained about L.G.B.T.Q. books in school libraries. The books, he said, were part of the “gay agenda.”
The Pride flag, Mr. Ghalib said, needed to be taken down in the name of neutrality, so the city could avoid being forced to fly banners from hate groups.
Ms. Majewski, the former mayor, called its removal “completely about bigotry.”
Republicans seized on the infighting by reaching out to Mr. Ghalib.
In July 2023, Mr. Ghalib appeared on a podcast hosted by Tudor Dixon, the evangelical conservative Republican who had recently lost the Michigan governor’s race to Gretchen Whitmer. On the podcast, Mr. Ghalib complained about aggressive behavior and abusive attacks from liberal opposition. He sent a warning: If you “discontinue supporting me, why do you think I’ll continue to support you?”
Then Mr. Ghalib led a meeting with Muslim leaders and Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the conservative firebrand and conspiracy theorist who briefly served as national security adviser during the Trump presidency. Mr. Flynn, who had previously called Islam “a cancer,” now spoke of forming a conservative coalition between Christians and Muslims.
Soon, emissaries for Mr. Trump were reaching out to the mayor. Eventually, Mr. Ghalib said, the two had a private conversation at a Trump rally.
Mr. Ghalib told The Times that he and other Muslim Americans feel dismissed and overlooked by Democrats. He cited the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas, and noted that more than 100,000 people protested by voting uncommitted in Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary. But, he said, “nothing changed” in terms of Mr. Biden’s policies.
Mr. Ghalib, smiling proudly, said Mr. Trump showed him respect.
Mr. Trump has denigrated Palestinians, called Middle Eastern immigrants “known terrorists” and encouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.
None of that swayed Mr. Ghalib’s confidence in the former president. “He kept repeating to me that his goal is to end the chaos in the Middle East,” the mayor said.
Though he does not agree with Mr. Trump on everything, Mr. Ghalib called him a “decisive and family-oriented person” who is “very principled.”
Reminded of Mr. Trump’s frequent spreading of disinformation, as well as his conviction for covering up an affair with a porn star, Mr. Ghalib said such matters were in “the media,” but “who knows?”
“I hope he will not disappoint me,” Mr. Ghalib said. “We’ll see.”
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