Fergie Chambers at home in Tunis, Tunisia, on 8 February 2024. Photo: Chedly Ben Ibrahim.
By Timothy Pratt – Jul 18, 2026
Stella Schnabel says Trump administration is falsely accusing James ‘Fergie’ Chambers of contributing to Hamas
Although her husband, James “Fergie” Chambers, had been locked up in Spain for nearly a week, Stella Schnabel didn’t break down and cry until Thursday, when she finally got to speak to him for several minutes – enough time, she said, “for us to say we love each other and for him to say: ‘Tell the kids I love them.’”
Spanish authorities, operating on a US extradition request, arrested the 41-year-old Chambers, a US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects worldwide, last Friday in Ibiza. He has been transferred to a prison in Madrid. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking his extradition for alleged financial support of Hamas, according to a spokesperson for the Spanish high court.
The court has two weeks to decide on Chambers’s appeal seeking bail, and 40 days to decide on the US extradition request. If the court denies the extradition, the case closes. If it grants the extradition, the council of ministers has the final decision, according to the spokesperson. The indictment against Chambers is sealed.
This is the first known case of the US seeking extradition of a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, veteran attorney Stanley Cohen told the Guardian earlier this week.
It is unfolding as Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, convened 66 countries this week – including Spain – as part of a broader effort to discredit leftwing activity as terrorism. One of Chambers’s attorneys, Josep Riba, said in a statement that Spain’s participation in the conference “has raised his family’s concern that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez – otherwise renowned for standing up to President Donald Trump and voicing his solidarity with Palestinians – may comply with the US’s politically motivated attack”.
Schnabel, an actor and daughter of painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, said she had been in shock and hardly slept until she heard Chambers’s voice Thursday. She still hadn’t seen him. “It’s been very stressful,” she said.
She described how the two had been on family vacation last week, accompanied by their five-year-old son and other family members. Chambers also has three teenaged children from a previous relationship.
The couple had been considering a move to Ibiza, and were driving along a dirt road on the Spanish island on their way to visit a potential school for their son last Friday. Suddenly, seven police officers in several cars cut them off, she said. “I said to Fergie: ‘You know what’s happening, right?’” she said. The officers told her she couldn’t film them with her phone and handcuffed Chambers. The arrest took less than five minutes, she said.
Chambers has said that he has known since 2015 that he was on the US federal government’s radar, due to activism against police in Atlanta. A self-described communist and anti-imperialist, he is heir to one of the richest families in the US, the owners of Atlanta-based Cox Communications. He sold stock back to his family worth about $250m in mid-2023 and since then has been funding an estimated 100 projects in 20 countries, Schnabel said.
She said that includes, in Gaza, a $250,000 donation to the Sameer Project, which helped fund a bakery producing thousands of loaves of free bread daily during Israel’s ongoing siege on the territory. It also included support for a free medical clinic, also in Gaza, and a $100,000 grant to the Zaynab Project, which provides mental health support to orphaned children, Schnabel said.
She said Chambers also paid for the legal fees of some members of the group formerly known as Palestine Action in the US – a group proscribed in the UK as a “terrorist organization”.
Chambers has been the subject of numerous profiles in US media, due to his beliefs, his activism and how he uses his wealth.
Now, Schnabel said, the US is accusing Chambers of laundering $7.5m wired several years ago from an American bank account to Tunisia, where the couple lived at the time, and somehow using the money to support Hamas. She has seen part of the indictment and said the US government does not clearly state how Chambers did what he is accused of – and that those funds went to purchase the popular football club Club Africain, and to pay off debt and past-due salaries as well as rebuilding a training center and building youth football fields.
The club, which she said “makes millions of people happy”, went on to win the Tunisian football league in May.
On Thursday, one of the attorneys defending Chambers told Schnabel that several Tunisians in prison in Madrid recognized the American and voiced their support. “He’s a national hero there,” Schnabel said.
As of this week, Schnabel, who had been living with Chambers in Ireland for the last year-plus, is quickly learning about the political and legal intricacies of Spain.
On Friday morning, she had her first meeting with a legal team assembled by Baltasar Garzón, an acclaimed Spanish former judge and widely experienced lawyer, who is known for seeking the extradition from London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, as well as pursuing accountability for human rights abuses in Spain, Argentina and elsewhere.
“I feel supported at a high level,” Schnabel said. “I’m actively trying to meet with anyone who understands” the law surrounding extradition.
Thirteen Spanish political organizations, and five members of Spain’s congress, sent a letter to two ministers earlier this week, opposing Chambers’s extradition. The letter reminds the two top officials of Sanchez’s government that Spanish law allows the council of ministers to reject an extradition request if “there are valid reasons to believe that the petition’s purpose is to persecute or punish a person for their political opinions”.
The letter also “demands that US authorities offer complete documentation … demonstrating the existence of concrete criminal conduct, differentiated from political activism, international solidarity, humanitarian donations or support for social organizations and media”.
Schnabel is struggling to understand how her husband landed in jail “for helping people experiencing genocide”, she said. “It’s incredible that this can happen to someone who is supporting people trying to exist and survive colonization and ethnic cleansing.”
