Members of Lewiston’s immigrant community don’t have much of a say on city matters.
There are serious concerns about representation for members of the immigrant community under the current system, and increasing right-wing activism has created a local political climate energized by misinformation that further disenfranchises those residents.
There is undoubtedly a racial component to the misinformation targeting immigrants, as most immigrants to Lewiston over the past few decades have been of African descent.
Although many first- and second-generation immigrants are US citizens and make up a significant portion of the city’s voters, the existing form of our municipal government doesn’t allow them to have proper representation.
Things need to change.
It’s important to remember that it was only seven years ago when a Lewiston Mayor resigned for sending racist text messages to a woman who claimed the two had an affair.
Messages showed that Mayor comparing people of color to farm equipment, as well as describing local Republican get-togethers as Ku Klux Klan meetings.
Few would say that the political climate has gotten any better in Lewiston, and many do say that it’s gotten much worse.
Right-wing activists have been building up an underground presence for years now, and have become particularly emboldened over the last half decade.
Their manufactured chaos feeds off of our defunct local political system. There are plenty of examples.
The city’s ward map splits voters in Lewiston’s immigrant neighborhoods. Take a look at Ward Five.
Half of it is in the Farwell School neighborhood, while the other half is downtown. That means half of Ward Five’s residents are guaranteed to be disenfranchised, and it is most often the residents of the downtown portion.
That downtown portion of Ward Five is home to a large number of the city’s immigrant community, along with an adjacent portion of Ward Three.
Why not redraw the Ward Map to combine the downtown portion of Ward Five with the portion of Ward Three that is also home to many in the immigrant community?
That would nearly guarantee representation for the immigrant community, and eliminate the problem of Ward Five being split between unmatched pieces.
Even the system of solely using wards to elect City Councilors makes proper representation less likely.
This system greatly favors homeowners who are more tied to a property, as opposed to renters who may need to leave their wards in order to find another place to live. With ever-increasing rent costs in an unaffordable economy, housing stability is worse than it has ever been.
Younger residents and residents from the immigrant community tend to be renters. Both groups have their representation lessened as a result, but the city has had many more elected leaders under 40 years of age than it has had elected leaders from the immigrant community.
Lewiston’s system of governance also puts up a lot of obstacles for any leaders of the immigrant community who do get elected to office.
Creating a system wherein immigrant voices on issues are actively sought isn’t something city officials have ever tried to do with earnest.
Safiya Khalid was elected to the Lewiston City Council in 2019, the first person of Somali descent to be elected to any office in the city.
Having served with her on the Council, I can attest that Safiya usually had to work harder than her peers just to have the same level of respect. She had to advocate more than she should’ve to simply have discussions on issues important to many of our city’s residents (particularly residents in the immigrant community).
We worked together on the city’s ad hoc diversity, equity and inclusion committee of 2020, and put forward a good path for Lewiston city government. However, many of those recommended changes have either been reversed by subsequent Councils, or they were never implemented in the first place.
She was the first Somali-American elected to the Council, yet her perspective was rarely sought or prioritized when it should’ve been.
Even as an elected official, her voice was minimized in the existing system.
When happened to Iman Osman is a more complex example of the issues that exist in our city’s governmental structures.
When it became publicly known that Iman, a local social worker who was serving on the School Committee, was temporarily displaced from his place of residence, right-wing activists pounced on the opportunity to attack a public official from the immigrant community.
Under Maine law, a resident does not lose their voting address if they’re temporarily displaced. Iman had every intention to return to his residence, a place his brother owns.
And the reason for the displacement was due to building damage from a police raid that targeted an individual who lived in a different part of the building than Iman. He wasn’t displaced because of his own doing.
So, Iman did nothing wrong. People may not like it, and they may not agree with the state law, but it is the law and we Mainers have rights.
When Iman took out papers to run for Ward Five on the City Council, he broke no rules in using the address of the damaged building, despite the misunderstandings and obsessions of many in and out of our community.
The Maine Wire, a reporting outlet operated and funded by the right-wing Maine Policy Institute (itself funded by wealthy right-wing elitists), has been the central source of misinformation in Lewiston over the past half-year.
Their reporting has clearly targeted immigrant communities and elected officials from those communities. Their goal is to support right-wing candidates and causes, and they face zero repercussions for publishing untrue information that damages the lives of individuals and their communities.
Of course, most of the accusations that the Maine Wire levies at individuals are the same things being done by right-wing leaders both nationally and in Maine. Their goal clearly isn’t to report the unbiased truth.
Social media doesn’t make it easy to pick apart truth from misinformation. I’ve seen many people I highly respect fall for bogus reporting by the Maine Wire.
The Maine Wire didn’t create the conditions that have allowed them to thrive, but they sure are taking advantage of the situation. Worst of all, their bogus reporting encourages right-wing radicals from outside of Lewiston to disrupt Lewiston city business, spreading horrible falsehoods about Lewiston in the process.
The outlet has been a cancer in Lewiston politics, and their obsession with Iman Osman is clearly reflective of their racist anti-immigrant tendencies.
Without them, it’s hard to imagine Iman facing the level of harassment that he’s faced.
It undoubtedly created the conditions that resulted in two criminal charges against him.
Last December, after he won his City Council seat, Iman was charged with two counts of knowingly receiving stolen firearms.
He denies the charges, of course.
Anyone who actually knows Iman found those charges astounding.
Unbelievable, really.
But let’s look at the situation in context.
Iman didn’t just run for City Council. He challenged an incumbent right-wing woman for her seat. A woman who was adored by local right-wingers.
And he won.
And then less than a month later, he received those criminal charges.
Multiple sources have told me that the charges stem from the police raid on Iman’s building more than a year prior.
This leaves a lot of reasonable questions to be answered.
I can understand that police and prosecutors prefer to withhold information prior to a case being tried (I’ve sat through many Law & Order marathons in my time), but considering the political nature of charges against a sitting elected official, more should have been released to justify the charges.
Iman is an American citizen who has been in the United States for decades. Heck, we graduated from Lewiston High School together in 2009. He’s an American, through and through.
So why were the charges filed by a Homeland Security Investigations officer (as sources have told me), and why were they not filed by a local detective? Considering the current politicization of the Department of Homeland Security and the fact that Iman has long been a US citizen, this deserves some type of public explanation.
Also, why were the charges filed more than a year after the incident in which firearms were supposedly confiscated?
Without any explanation from the District Attorney’s office, that void of confusion became a battle zone between the truth and misinformation.
Unfortunately, misinformation won out and enough people fell victim to the right-wing activism.
Extraordinary pressure was put on both Iman and city officials, and got to the point where Iman had no choice but to resign his seat on the Council, less than a week into his term.
When viewed through a narrow lens, it’s easy to view the issue as a politician facing charges and resigning as a result. Sounds pretty normal and expected, and the average Joe likely wouldn’t question the legitimacy of the charges or expect any kind of consequences if the charges turned out to be unfounded.
But it didn’t all happen in a vacuum.
The first man of Somali-Bantu background to be elected to Lewiston’s City Council was forced out of office after unseating a Councilor beloved by local right-wingers, all in the context of anti-Somali rhetoric from national leaders working to actively target law-abiding immigrants and citizens, with some local public support for his resignation resulting from misinformation spewed largely by a garbage reporting outlet.
There has been almost nothing released publicly about the case or the charges against Iman, with only limited court filings to go off of. It’s hard to imagine that there isn’t something that could be made available to the public.
If the charges are so strong as to justify unseating an elected official, then the District Attorney absolutely should make some kind of statement acknowledging the seriousness of the situation.
He should be assuring the public that the charges are not political, and that he is absolutely certain of a conviction.
The fact that he hasn’t done so is extremely concerning.
If the charges are eventually dropped, or if Iman wins the case against them, then what? Who pays the price for the damage done to Iman’s life? Who faces consequences for disenfranchising not only the voters of Ward Five, but the entire immigrant community in Lewiston?
Will there be any kind of consequence whatsoever for anyone, and what does that tell us about how our local systems of power treat people of color?
The impact needs to be considered. If Iman is proved right by the justice system, it will mean a leader who was both the city’s sole elected official of color, and the city’s sole elected official from the immigrant community, was denied the ability to represent the people who otherwise have no representation.
White people have ample representation in Lewiston. People of color, particularly those also from the immigrant community, have consistently not had the same level of representation.
It’s also hard to imagine a white person in Iman’s situation facing the same level of scrutiny.
The impacts are different, and so Iman’s case here should be looked at differently. The public deserves more reasoning behind the charges.
A flaw in the City Charter prevented a special election to fill the remainder of Iman’s term, so the Council was forced to vote between five applicants (none of whom were from the immigrant community).
Considering the vitriol coming from some right-wing radicals, it makes sense why nobody from the immigrant community chose to seek the position.
Those same right-wingers pushed hard for the reinstatement of the incumbent who lost her seat in the election, an effort that proved unsuccessful.
Many residents from the immigrant community (and many from without) came to that City Council meeting where Iman’s replacement was chosen. Ward Five residents overwhelmingly supported a candidate who was ultimately not considered.
Although Iman resides in the city’s downtown, his replacement lives in the Farwell School neighborhood of Ward Five.
So not only did members of the immigrant community lose representation, but so did residents of the downtown (out of the sixteen currently-elected municipal officials, only two live downtown).
So, voters in Ward Five chose Iman, then were denied representation by him being forced out of office.
Next, they were denied the chance to vote on a replacement due to an administrative error made five years ago. The Council would instead make the decision. Representation was denied, again.
Lastly, they overwhelmingly supported a candidate who was not considered by the Council (although to be fair, that was based more on who reached out to the Council rather than it being the clear will of voters). From many perspectives, representation was once again denied.
It’s certainly no slight against the new Ward Five councilor, but she was not selected by any voters of her ward, nor did she receive any strong public backing during the confirmation process. She will likely serve her constituents well, but I’m sure even she would agree that representation has been lost in this whole fiasco.
So, where do we go from here?
Systemic reform is needed, badly.
The City Council should consider redrawing the Ward Map so as to not divide neighborhoods and voting blocs.
The Council should also allow residents to vote on forming a Charter Commission, something that hasn’t been done in nearly half a century.
The Charter Review Committee of 2021 had a very respectable membership, but they were all white and over the age of 40. More representation is needed when it comes to reforming the structure of our city government.
The city has already taken action to allow for special elections in the future, but it certainly isn’t enough.
City officials, both elected and professional staff, should be having conversations about how to make the city more equitable for all of its residents. Increasing involvement in city affairs by residents from the immigrant community should be a goal of the city (actual involvement, not just public forums or subcommittee appointments).
Residents should demand more from their city government.
Misinformation will continue to dominate social media, and that won’t change until things shift at the national level. Lewiston residents absolutely need to be vigilant and skeptical about the information they come across online.
Lewiston city government is an arena not currently welcoming to residents from the immigrant community, and it deserves attention.
Americans certainly have a right to hold right-wing political beliefs, but when disruptive activism replaces an ability to win at the polls, communities pay the price.
When that activism targets an already-marginalized group of people, it deserves condemnation.
We live in rough economic times, where the ultra-rich keep getting richer while the rest of us keep finding it harder to make ends meet.
Those ultra-rich scumbags want us to fight each other so that we don’t focus on them They stir us up by blaming vulnerable groups, particularly people who may look different or practice a different religion.
No more.
No more blaming marginalized groups for the destruction caused by wealthy elites.
No more feeding into the web of lies that these elites intricately weave.
2026 is gearing up to be a year for revolution.
The weather may be cold, and it may still be winter in America, but there will be a spring.
There will be a time for renewal and change, both nationally and locally.
That change absolutely must include ways to increase representation for members of Lewiston’s immigrant community.
It’s our duty to do our part for our little corner of the world.
We all deserve an equal say in the direction of our city.
Luke Jensen, Editor
