Saudi Arabia demands American give up citizenship to reunite with family

A 74-year-old dual US-Saudi citizen who spent more than a year in prison in the kingdom is now being told he cannot return to his Florida home unless he renounces his US citizenship, his son told the Associated Press. 

Saad Ibrahim Almadi was detained in 2021 at Riyadh’s airport when he travelled to his native Saudi Arabia to visit family. He was charged with harbouring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilise the kingdom, as well as supporting and funding terrorism because of 14 tweets he had made on his Twitter account (now called X) while in the US over the previous seven years. 

One of his tweets referred to Jamal Khashoggi, a Middle East Eye and Washington Post columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Other tweets included criticism of corruption inside the kingdom.

Saad was sentenced to 19 years in prison but then released after more than a year.

Haydn Welch, advocacy officer at the Washington-based Middle East Democracy Center (MEDC), told Middle East Eye that the posts were relatively “tame”. 

So why expend the resources to detain Saad? 

“He is small potatoes, but he’s also not the only one. We’ve seen some pretty low-profile folks who’ve gotten ridiculously long sentences in Saudi Arabia in similar circumstances too… they weren’t well-known activists. They had a couple dozen followers or something on Twitter, but they’re still detained because no dissent will be tolerated,” she said. 

Saad’s son, 28-year-old Ibrahim, who is in the US, now says his father is being pressured to give up his US citizenship to get an exit ban lifted that would allow him to return home. 

His father did sign a document under pressure to relinquish his American citizenship, Ibrahim said, but given the bureaucratic process involved and the determination that he did not do it voluntarily, the US State Department rejected that effort, and Saad remains a US citizen. 

The MEDC said it is aware of at least three other cases where dual US-Saudi nationals are under pressure to give up their American citizenship. Saudi Arabia does not recognise dual nationalities. 

“I think [it’s] a very dishonest ploy to get something that they want. They won’t follow through or honour their word,” Welch told MEE. 

“I mean, it doesn’t make sense, right? So he renounces the citizenship, and then he’s allowed to leave the country to go back and live in America where he’s no longer a citizen? It doesn’t hold up.”

Wrongful detentions

Ibrahim has long been calling for his father to be designated as a “wrongfully detained” US citizen, which would see his case moved from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA).

SPEHA has a wider variety of tools to secure the release of Americans considered unjustly detained abroad.

On Wednesday, with less than two weeks left in office, the Biden administration rolled out its first “Strategy on Countering Wrongful Detention,” a 27-page document outlining the “full spectrum of diplomatic efforts in preventing and deterring the wrongful detention of US nationals”. 

It highlights two categories of wrongful detentions. The first is “deliberate”, in which evidence – as an example – may be planted to lead to someone’s arrest. The second is “opportunistic”, whereby a US national might commit something like a drug offence, but authorities then take advantage of the person’s nationality. 

“The [State] Department and interagency partners employ all instruments of national power to proactively counter wrongful detentions,” the document stipulates. However, it adds that “there may be times when policy considerations conflict with prevention and deterrence efforts, and prioritization and resources provided to this issue suffer”.

A request for comment from MEE to SPEHA on Saad’s status on Wednesday was handed off to Consular Affairs instead, which told MEE a response could not be made available by the time of publication. 

‘Partners with the United States also take American nationals… but they’re often just so left out of the conversation’

– Haydn Welch, Middle East Democracy Center

The move could indicate that either Saad was at some point – perhaps not publicly – within the SPEHA portfolio and is no longer there because he is technically out of prison, or it could mean he was never designated as wrongfully detained to begin with, Welch explained to MEE. 

“What you’ll probably hear from the US government is that they can’t lay out the exact process by which they determine that someone’s wrongfully detained for security reasons,” Welch said.

“The US government doesn’t want other countries to know ‘here’s exactly how we make this wrongful detention designation, and here’s the criteria that we think of’, because they don’t want to incentivise further hostage taking or further wrongful detention,” she added. 

“But part of the problem with this process being so opaque is that it leaves a lot of families in the lurch.”  

Ibrahim told the AP that his father was visited by a US consular official nearly a year ago but that the US hasn’t taken nearly enough action. Advocating for Saad has become an all-consuming task, leaving Ibrahim with little ability to move on with his own life, he said. 

One problem with the State Department’s wrongful detention strategy document, Welch told MEE, is that it emphasises how US “adversaries” are the ones who detain US citizens. 

“That caught my eye,” she said. “That’s not true, right? So adversaries absolutely detain Americans. They absolutely take Americans hostage. But the problem is, is that partners with the United States also take American nationals… but they’re often just so left out of the conversation.” 

Prospects under Trump

Despite President Joe Biden’s assertions on the campaign trail in 2020 that Saudi Arabia was a “pariah”, he was soon in the kingdom himself, meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman when oil prices became too high for Americans to handle. 

Since then, a key focus of his administration has been an effort to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, building on Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords. Opening up diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel has long been viewed as the ultimate goal in the region, to help fend off Iranian influence and secure American economic and military interests. 

That effort was largely upended by the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, which has continued unabated for 15 months. 

On 20 January, President-elect Trump will assume the Oval Office again, with Saudi Arabia welcoming his re-election. The Trump family has extensive business dealings in the kingdom, so could his penchant for cutting deals bring back Saad?

“I think if he’s committed to that, I think it could happen,” Welch said. “I think it’s all just a matter of how much President Trump really wants that to happen.” 

“At the Middle East Democracy Center we have a lot of concerns about the US government’s commitment to human rights globally under a Trump administration, but when it comes to bringing American citizens home, we do think that there’s some potential there.”