Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Mich., and the city favored Muslims over Jews and Christians by promoting Ramadan, but not holidays of other faith traditions, a new lawsuit alleges.
City resident Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent at the Federalist, told JNS that she filed the suit after seeing banners on city property celebrating the Muslim holiday in April 2025 and a “large, lighted, crescent moon,” a Muslim symbol, marking the holiday in a park.
Having seen no such signage for Lent, the Christian holiday that was then in its fourth week, or for the upcoming holidays of Easter or Passover, she emailed the city attorney to ask whether the city would also display materials about those holidays.
“After I contacted the city to ensure they would be displaying Easter and Passover banners, not only did the city ignore me but the mayor then purchased more Ramadan decorations for the following year,” Cleveland told JNS. (JNS sought comment from the city.)
The Dearborn City Council “had a budget surplus and could have easily allocated money for Christian and Jewish banners and displays, such as a menorah and a crèche,” a Nativity scene, “but refused to address the discrimination,” she said.
The budget that the council passed in May didn’t allocate funds for Passover or Easter banners despite Cleveland’s pleas to that effect at a City Council meeting.
“I did everything I could to not make a federal case out of this, and the mayor instead escalated and retaliated,” she told JNS.
Cleveland said that the city attorney, who answers to the mayor, told the City Council not to talk to her, and the attorney refused her request for a meeting.
‘Equal footing’
The American Freedom Law Center, a conservative nonprofit, filed the suit on Thursday on Cleveland’s behalf. The suit alleges that the city violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by privileging Islam over Judaism and Christianity.
Cleveland filed a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed the city spent $1,500 in taxpayer dollars on the banners and $5,000 on the crescent moon display, the suit alleges.
She also learned from the request that the city’s police department sold Ramadan shirts with its emblem on them and that Hammoud used his mayoral email address to invite certain people to attend an iftar gathering to break the Ramadan fast.
The suit accuses Hammoud of “anti-Christian bias” and cites a September 2025 City Council meeting, in which a pastor decried renaming a street after Osama Siblani, publisher of Arab American News. The suit alleges that Siblani supports terror groups.
The pastor said during the public comment session that naming a street after the publisher would be like naming a street after Hamas or Hezbollah.
Hammoud accused the pastor of being hypocritical “when you yourself have videos on YouTube standing in front of my mosque saying the cruelest of things about Muslims,” according to the suit.
“As mayor, you are not welcome here,” Hammoud said, per the lawsuit. “The day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city.”
When participants in an Al-Quds Day rally in 2024 shouted “death to America” and “death to Israel,” the mayor stated on social media that he rejects “all inflammatory and violent statements made at the 2024 gathering.” He did not say, as he did with the pastor, that they weren’t welcome in the city, according to the suit.
The mayor also “did not expressly condemn the vitriol directed toward Jews,” the suit alleges.
Cleveland told JNS that she believes the lawsuit is one of the first of its kind. Prior cases have tried to get governments to remove displays.
“I am not asking for that,” she said. “Just as I wish my Muslim neighbors a ‘blessed Ramadan,’ I did not object to the city doing the same, but want the city to also recognize Christian and Jewish holidays on an equal footing.”
