In the summer of 2025, the race for governor of Maine was more than a year away and crowded with candidates. Bobby Charles found a way to stand out.

He did it by repeatedly questioning whether one of the Maine Legislature's three Somali-born members is loyal to the United States.

Four words

The target was Rep. Deqa Dhalac, D-South Portland. She fled war-torn Somalia and came to the U.S. 30 years ago, became a naturalized citizen, and in 2022 was elected mayor of South Portland — the first Somali-born mayor in the United States.

That milestone brought national press, including an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." An interviewer asked what she was hearing from people back in Somalia. Here is what she actually said:

"They are asking, 'what can we do back home in Somalia, how we can change policies, how can the politics in Somalia resonate what we have in the United States — the democracy we have — how can you help us, you know, be a better country and build back what we used to have a long time ago.' So hopefully we will be able to help our country, our former country, Somalia, and show what we can do here and that it can also be built into other countries."

She is describing exporting American democracy. She calls Somalia "our former country" in the same breath.

Three years later, on July 23, 2025, a right-wing account called End Wokeness posted a clip of that interview to its 3.5 million followers. It compressed her answer down to four words, presented as her goal: helping "our country of Somalia."

This is the same account that helped spread the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people's pets — a smear that traveled far enough that Donald Trump repeated it on a debate stage in 2024.

About three hours later, the official account of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — the agency running the administration's mass deportation campaign — boosted the post to its own 2.5 million followers with a one-word comment: "Pause." It followed with a second post featuring a photo of Trump.

Then Bobby Charles picked it up.

Roughly 20 posts about one of 151 legislators

In a Facebook video, Charles said:

"A Maine representative, a Democrat, Deqa Dhalac, today went out and said that her goal is to protect 'our country, Somalia.' Ms. Dhalac, with all due respect, you are an American, and if you are an American your country is the United States of America."

She had not said that. She had said the opposite of that, in a 2022 interview, in the full quote above.

Charles kept going. His later posts questioned Dhalac's allegiance to the United States and suggested she had no business representing Maine taxpayers if her priority was Somalia. Dhalac is one member of a 151-seat House of Representatives. Since August 1 of that year, Charles posted about her or about the backlash to his own statements roughly 20 times — and more often than that on X, where commenters cheered him on and called for Dhalac and other Somali immigrants to be deported.

He circulated a petition calling on her to apologize or resign, and tried to deliver the signed copies to the House majority office at the State House.

He also turned her into a cartoon: a woman in a hijab sitting in a classroom, with "reading assignments" that included the U.S. Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Charles wasn't originating this. The Maine Wire, a conservative site backed by judicial activist and seasonal Maine resident Leonard Leo, had been accusing Dhalac of putting "America last" and "Somalia first" since at least that March. The site then amplified Charles's attacks back out to its own audience. He later wrote in a Portland Press Herald column that the Homeland Security posts justified his criticism of her.

House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, in a joint statement with his leadership team, said:

"There is no place in Maine for disgusting smear campaigns."

Dhalac didn't respond publicly at the time. She thanked the people who defended her in a Facebook post.

Maine Public tried to reach Charles about his statements. He did not respond to a message left on his mobile phone. That same week, he called on the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the Mills administration, and for ICE to "wire brush every last illegal alien from Maine's streets."

From one lawmaker to a whole religion

The Dhalac campaign wasn't a one-off. It was the opening.

On May 22, 2026 — 18 days before the Republican primary — Charles released what his campaign billed as a three-step plan to stop the "Islamification" of Maine, promoting it as the first such plan from any candidate for governor in New England.

The plan would:

• Bar Maine courts from enforcing foreign or religious legal codes that conflict with the Constitution or state law, and restrict universities from using state or federal money to support designated terrorist organizations — modeled on Florida.
• Ban "foreign-linked Islamic compounds," modeled on Texas's action against a proposed development in North Texas.
• Direct Maine's Attorney General to designate organizations as terrorist groups under state law, restrict their ability to buy property, and bar state dollars, university resources, or school facilities from supporting them. The campaign named the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

His summary of it: "One country. One law."

He pushed the plan in the final days of the primary, and it drew allegations of racism from Democrats. The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, Devon Murphy-Anderson, called him "a far-right extremist who doesn't stand a chance at the ballot box this November." Charles won the primary 18 days later.

Charles's plan does not identify a single Maine case in which any court enforced a religious legal code, or name a single Maine development it would ban. The models it borrows from are all somewhere else.

We have followed this playbook in two other states, and it ends the same way both times.

In Texas, Greg Abbott declared CAIR a terrorist organization. Texas Monthly obtained 1,300 pages of emails and found that twelve of the thirteen points in his proclamation matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group.

In Arkansas, the governor and attorney general mobilized against a Sharia takeover — and when we traced the panic to its source, it came down to a hate group's blog post and a small subdivision of five houses, two of which are lived in by Christians.

Charles is now proposing to import that to Maine, with the state's chief law enforcement officer as the instrument.

Why this matters for a governor

A governor is not a talk show host. The office Charles is running for controls the Attorney General's priorities, the state police, school policy, and the machinery that decides which Mainers get treated as suspects.

He has already shown what he does with a platform and an unverified clip: roughly 20 posts, a resignation petition, and a cartoon aimed at a naturalized citizen elected by her neighbors. He did it while running for office, before he had any power at all.

Some of Dhalac's defenders made a simple point that got lost in the noise. Immigrants often feel responsible for the people they left behind — many still have family there. The World Bank tracked $656 billion in remittances worldwide in 2023, including $54 billion to the Sub-Saharan African countries that include Somalia. Sending help home is not disloyalty. It is one of the most ordinary things immigrants do.

Deqa Dhalac is an American citizen who was elected by South Portland twice — once as mayor, once to the Legislature. Bobby Charles decided that was worth 20 posts and a petition.

Mainers deserve a governor who represents all of them. We deserve better.

Source

Steve Mistler and Kevin Miller, "GOP gubernatorial hopeful takes aim at one of Maine's Somali-American lawmakers" — Maine Public, August 14, 2025. Photo: courtesy photo via Maine Public.