Solidarity on trial: Fergie Chambers, Spain and Washington’s war on the left
On 10 July, US political activist and philanthropist James ‘Fergie’ Chambers was arrested by Spanish police while driving with his family in Ibiza. More than three months later, he remains in Aranjuez prison near Madrid, separated from his partner, Stella Schnabel, who is pregnant, and their young son, awaiting a decision on whether he will be handed over to the United States.
Chambers is wanted by the Trump administration on charges that, if he is extradited and convicted, could see him imprisoned for decades. His real crime, in the eyes of the imperialists and Zionists, is solidarity with the Palestinian people. And his fate may now be decided not only in the courts, but at the ballot box: Spain goes to the polls on 29 November, and the opinion polls currently point to the emergence of a governing coalition of the right and far-right – that may be only too happy to deliver him to Washington.
Who is Fergie Chambers?
Chambers is not the typical target of Washington’s counter-terrorism apparatus. Heir to the Cox Enterprises media and automotive empire, in 2023 he cut ties with his family, sold his stake for a reported $250 million, and set about giving much of it away to humanitarian and social causes.
Over the past three years, he has donated over a million dollars to humanitarian relief in Gaza, including a quarter of a million dollars to the Sameer Project. That money funded a bakery producing 3,600 free loaves a day, a desalination plant supplying 150,000 litres of clean water daily, and a free clinic in Jabalia treating up to 300 patients a day, with a further $100,000 for the mental-health care of orphaned children. The British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta calls him “a vital supporter for the provision of care for children wounded in the genocide”.
Closer to home, Chambers bankrolled the movement against Atlanta’s ‘Cop City’ police mega-base, and paid the bail and legal fees of jailed activists, including those of Palestine Action US. Since late 2023 he has lived in Tunisia, where he invested in local businesses and bought Club Africain, one of the oldest and most popular football clubs in north Africa.
What is he charged with?
Washington is seeking Chambers’ extradition on three counts: money laundering, and riot and conspiracy to riot, the latter two arising from 2023 Palestine Action protests at a factory of the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems in New Hampshire. The money-laundering charge concerns some $7.5 million he transferred from the US to Tunisia, which US prosecutors allege was linked to support for Hamas. His lawyers point out that much of the money went into Club Africain – paying off its debts and improving its facilities – and that the funds sent to Gaza paid for bread, water and medical care.
Chambers did not personally participate in the Elbit action. The four women who were there received minor convictions and short sentences. Chambers, whose role was reportedly to pay activists’ bail and legal costs, faces three federal charges and an international manhunt.
His Spanish lawyer, the former investigating judge Baltasar Garzón, has set out in detail why the case amounts to political persecution. The US itself never charged Chambers with terrorism; its Interpol notice classified the offences as vandalism and money laundering. It was the Spanish prosecutor who added the terrorism label – and in doing so, as Garzón observes, “closes the only door that the Spanish legal order opens to someone prosecuted for their ideas”, since extradition law prohibits surrender for political offences but makes an exception for terrorism. “The qualification does not describe the facts,” he writes; “it serves to cover up persecution.” Or, more simply: “Washington is seeking to punish an individual for what he said.”
The inevitable character assassination has followed. The Times informed its readers that a “communist accused of funding Hamas” had paid €7 million for a Dublin mansion; others have dredged up his past remarks to paint him as a dangerous fanatic. The purpose is transparent: to make a humanitarian donor sound like a terrorist financier, so that a political prosecution can pass as an ordinary criminal one.
A coordinated offensive
Chambers was seized on the very day US Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened ministers from more than 60 countries to confront what his administration now calls “transnational far-left terrorism”. Days later the State Department published a hundred-page report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism, recasting everyone from Black Lives Matter to the campus encampments against the Gaza genocide as fronts for Havana, and naming Jeremy Corbyn and the Cuba Solidarity Campaign for good measure.
The legal architecture for this offensive is NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum signed in September 2025 that directs federal agencies to investigate nonprofits, activists and their donors, listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” among the indicators of potential domestic terrorism. It is already producing results. Eight activists connected to a 2025 protest at the Prairieland immigration detention centre in Texas have received cumulative sentences of 450 years; one was given 30 years, in part for transporting leftist literature. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has promised to “identify illicit funding, however artfully it is concealed”, and FBI director Kash Patel has pledged to dismantle “Antifa and its funding networks”. This month, federal agents raided the home of the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
As Chloe Truong-Jones of Palestine Legal put it, “the government has explicitly declared war on the left.” Chambers – a wealthy communist who funds both Palestinian relief and US protest movements – is an ideal test case. If a man can be extradited across the Atlantic for funding bakeries in Gaza and bail funds in Georgia, then every donor, every convoy and every solidarity campaign is on notice.
Britain down the same road
Britain is travelling in in a similar direction. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 – the first time a protest group has ever been so designated (and a year before Washington got round to designating its US counterpart as such). Membership or support became a criminal offence, and more than two thousand people have since been arrested, overwhelmingly for nothing more than peacefully holding a placard, in what the UN’s human-rights chief, Volker Turk, called a “disturbing” misuse of counter-terrorism powers.
In April, Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition – organisers of the largest demonstrations Britain has seen in a generation – were convicted of breaching police conditions on a march. The British state has clearly decided that the most efficient way to deal with a mass movement against genocide is to call it terrorism.
A test of Spanish democracy
When Chambers was arrested, the case appeared to be a test for Spain. The government of Pedro Sánchez has done more than any other in Western Europe to distance itself from Washington’s wars: recognising the state of Palestine, passing emergency measures against the Gaza genocide, and refusing to let the US use Spanish bases to attack Iran.
Thirteen parties of the left and of the nations of the Spanish state – among them Podemos, Sumar, Izquierda Unida, ERC, the CUP, EH Bildu and the BNG – wrote to the government within days of the arrest, demanding that it block the extradition. More than 150 public figures, including Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Greta Thunberg, Brian Eno, Eric Cantona and Richard Gere, signed a letter to Sánchez calling the case “political persecution directed solely against a committed humanitarian” and asking that Chambers be granted political asylum.
Under Spanish extradition law, the government has two opportunities to stop the process: once at the outset, before the case goes to the courts, and again at the end, after the Audiencia Nacional has ruled. On 22 September, the Council of Ministers passed up the first of these opportunities, shamefully allowing the request to proceed to the judicial phase. Ione Belarra of Podemos called the decision “devastating”, describing Chambers as “the first political prisoner in Spanish history” to be jailed for supporting Palestine. Her verdict on the government’s commitment to the Palestinian cause was blunt: “none beyond the headlines”.
The case is now before the Audiencia Nacional, where Chambers has refused consent to his extradition. The Spanish judiciary is the institution that the country’s partial and negotiated transition from fascism left most untouched. These are the same courts that jailed Catalonia’s elected leaders for organising a referendum; that have pursued Sánchez’s own wife and brother through a series of politically motivated investigations; and that, in 2012, barred Garzón himself from the bench, after he had enraged the Spanish right by opening investigations into the crimes of the Franco dictatorship and into the corruption network at the heart of the conservative Partido Popular (People’s Party).
Time is of the essence
The question of what happens if the court approves the extradition has now been transformed by events. In early October, after the right-wing Catalan separatist party Junts voted down his government’s housing decrees amid mass protests over evictions, Sánchez called a snap general election for 29 November.
The current polls make for grim reading. Sánchez’ Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) is hovering around 28 percent; the parties to its left – Sumar and Podemos – around 8 percent. A coalition of the conservative People’s Party and the far-right Vox (corresponding in British terms to something like a coalition of the Tories and Reform) is the only combination currently projected to win a majority. One survey for El País gives the two parties 198 of the 350 seats, with Vox roughly doubling its 2023 tally. Should that happen, Vox would enter government – the first time a party of the far right has done so since the death of Franco half a century ago.
It is difficult to imagine a PP–Vox coalition government having any compunction about delivering Chambers to the US. Vox has made no secret of its admiration for Trump and its extreme sympathy for the Israeli genocidal project (less well known is its connection to the Iranian terrorist group MEK). For Vox president Santiago Abascal, handing a communist and pro-Palestinian activist to the Trump administration would be a welcome early demonstration of Spain’s renewed loyalty.
That is why time matters. As Garzón has pointed out, “the government, even if it is acting in a caretaker capacity, has full power not to hand him over.” If nothing else it can act now to grant of political asylum. Every week of delay increases the likelihood that Chambers’ fate is decided by some of the most vicious reactionaries in Europe.
The parties to the Socialists’ left will hopefully make this an issue in the campaign as the Spanish electorate generally tends to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. A government that claims to stand with Palestine, and that asks for the votes of Spain’s large and active solidarity movement, should be asked a simple question before 29 November: will it release Fergie Chambers, or will it leave him for Abascal?
Solidarity is not a crime
The persecution of Fergie Chambers is not an isolated injustice. It is one front in a coordinated campaign, led from Washington and echoed in London, to redefine dissent as terrorism and solidarity as subversion. It targets him precisely because he has put his wealth at the service of the oppressed – an inversion of the normal relationship between money and power that the ruling class finds intolerable.
The Spanish government still has the means to stop it. If it fails to use them, it will have handed over both Chambers and a precedent to the far right.
Solidarity is not a crime. Free Fergie Chambers.