Palestinian Americans lobby Congress as Trump approves $2.8bn Israel arms package

On a Tuesday in late September, more than three hundred Palestinian Americans fanned out across Capitol Hill with a specific demand: stop sending weapons to Israel. They came from twenty-six states, moving through the offices of more than one hundred lawmakers—Democrats and Republicans alike—carrying constituent letters and personal stories. The timing was deliberate. Days earlier, the Trump administration had approved a $2.8 billion military package for Israel, a transfer that included forty thousand bombs: twenty thousand of the massive MK-84 munitions, each weighing two thousand pounds, alongside twenty thousand BLU-117 variants. These are the weapons that have already torn through Gaza's civilian infrastructure. The advocates wanted Congress to see their faces and hear their voices before the transfer could be formally cleared.

Jenna Eschiek, nineteen years old, came from Virginia to meet with Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Rob Wittman. She was born near Ramallah, in the West Bank, and now she is an American taxpayer. "I think the main point that we're trying to get across to every single office is that we're all proud to be American, and we all have our taxpayer dollars that we just don't want to see going to wars," she said. Yaseen Shaikh, twenty-two, traveled from Cleveland to press Ohio's two Republican senators, Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, both of whom have consistently voted against limiting arms sales to Israel. Shaikh spoke of standing on the shoulders of his peers, of feeling hopeful that change would come. The event was organized by Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, a group that has been pushing Congress to reckon with what it calls Israel's genocidal war in Gaza—a conflict that has now killed nearly seventy-four thousand Palestinians since October 2023, with nearly fourteen hundred more dead even after a ceasefire agreement took effect in October 2025.

What the advocates were walking into was a Congress that, for decades, has resisted conditioning military aid to Israel. But something has shifted. In July of the previous year, twenty-six Democratic senators voted to block some arms transfers—the first time a majority of Democrats in that chamber had done so. In April, a similar resolution gathered forty votes, all from Democrats, though it still fell short of passage in the one-hundred-member chamber. The Block the Bombs Act in the House, which calls for a partial arms embargo, had accumulated eighty-one co-sponsors by August. Twenty-two Democratic senators had just introduced a resolution demanding that the State Department investigate violence by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank, where at least nine American citizens have been killed in recent years. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had used his leverage to at least slow the congressional clearance process for the new weapons package.

Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of AJP Action, framed the moment as one where public opinion was finally catching up to policy reality. Polls have consistently shown majority support for conditioning at least some weapons to Israel, and support for Palestinian rights has surged. "I think now we are functioning within this context, where what happens in Palestine, the genocide that took place and continues to take place, what the terrorist settlers are doing in the West Bank, what the US and Israel are doing in the Middle East is catching up with us here," Abu Irshaid said, "and we're paying a price." He was optimistic about potential movement among Republicans too, noting that a December poll found a majority of Republicans under forty-five said they would prefer a 2028 presidential candidate who supports reducing taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel. "I think what we're seeing now is that the dam within the Republican Party is cracking," he said, though he acknowledged that the real test would come after Trump's political dominance faded.

But the advocates on Capitol Hill were also there to address something darker: the use of immigration law as a tool to silence pro-Palestine speech. Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, was detained by ICE in April and released in June after three decades as a US resident. His legal team says he was targeted based on a coerced confession extracted during Israeli detention when he was young. "Those criminals that detained me, they still exist," Sarsour said. "The same criminals that destroy Gaza, they killed tens of thousands of children and women, and men and family members." Leqaa Kordia, detained for three hundred sixty-eight days after participating in pro-Palestine campus protests in 2024, drew an explicit line between her experience and the broader system. "The same system that threw me in an ICE jail is the same system that funds and arms the military prisons in Israel," she said. "The same dehumanisation logic that allowed a guard to humiliate me allows the Israeli soldier to kidnap Palestinians and throw them into the shadows. The same power that keeps my case in limbo is the same power that sends billions of US tax dollars in bombs and weapons to fuel the Palestinian genocide." Both Sarsour and Kordia continue to face deportation proceedings. The advocates were asking Congress to reform the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the statute the Trump administration has cited to justify deporting individuals whose presence it deems to have "adverse foreign policy consequences." What they were describing was not two separate struggles but one system operating on two continents.