Dearborn Braces for Tuesday. The City’s Strategy: Give Him Nothing.
Tuesday evening, an anti-Islamic activist plans to hold a pig roast outside Dearborn City Hall, then walk into a City Council meeting to speak. He says he expects violence. The city’s police chief has a message for residents: don’t show up.
Jake Lang, 31, a pardoned Jan. 6 Capitol rioter and former Florida U.S. Senate candidate, told The Detroit News in a phone interview that he expects trouble at Tuesday’s 6 p.m. rally, which he’s planned to include a pig roast — a deliberate dig at Islamic dietary law — ahead of the 7 p.m. City Council meeting, where he intends to speak. Asked directly whether he anticipates violence, Lang’s answer was blunt: “Does the sun rise in the east? ... The Muslims are going to freak out on us.” He says he’s bringing “private security — 20 armed men to protect us.”
Why the city is on edge
This isn’t Lang’s first visit. During a November 2025 appearance, he marched through Dearborn carrying a Quran and bacon, threatened to burn the Quran, and closed his remarks to City Council by telling members to “get the f*** out of our country,” according to Michigan News Source. On Aug. 2, while shouting anti-immigration rhetoric into a bullhorn during Dearborn’s Arbaeen religious procession, Lang was punched from behind and chased by a crowd that pelted him with stones before police intervened, according to video reviewed by The Detroit News. Three people have since been arrested and charged in connection with that assault.
One of the three, 57-year-old Abbas Abdoush, was released from local custody on a GPS tether, then taken into ICE custody, where he remains at Michigan’s North Lake Processing Center awaiting an immigration hearing. ICE described him as a “criminal illegal alien from Iraq” with a 1999 second-degree murder conviction stemming from a 1998 vehicular death in Detroit — a serious prior conviction, separate from and predating the new charges he now faces over the Aug. 2 incident.
For security reasons, Dearborn has moved Tuesday’s council meeting from City Hall to the Henry Ford Centennial Library, roughly half a mile from Lang’s planned rally site.
The city’s strategy: starve it of an audience
Dearborn Police Chief Issa Shahin — the city’s first Muslim police chief — has repeatedly and publicly asked residents to simply stay away. “These groups that are coming here are coming for one reason, and that’s to provoke a reaction and generate attention,” Shahin said in a video posted in English and Arabic. “If nobody shows up to react, they have nothing. The most powerful thing that this community can do is refuse to give them an audience.” He said anyone with actual business before the council is welcome and will be protected: “You’ll be safe. We’ll make sure of it. But if you’re thinking of coming down just to confront these people, don’t. That’s exactly what they want, and it puts you at risk.”
@DearbornPolice 🚨 A Message from Chief Issa Shahin
— CrimeInTheD ® (@CrimeInTheD) August 13, 2026
The Dearborn Police Department is aware that individuals and groups from outside our community may travel to Dearborn for the City Council meeting on Tuesday, August 18. We have been closely monitoring the situation and are… pic.twitter.com/AhKaqIXkll
That strategy has a track record in Dearborn. Former Police Chief Ronald Haddad, who led the department from 2008 to 2021, told The Detroit News the city learned through trial and error how to handle a nearly identical case: anti-Muslim pastor Terry Jones, who staged 10 visits to Dearborn to burn Qurans and protest. “We had 10,000 people out here during his first rally,” Haddad said. “At his last one, there were literally four.”