On the Run in America - Part 2

The continuing story of an Iraqi Christian’s struggle to stay one step ahead of ICE

By Amanda Uhle

Originally printed in The Delacorte Review August 15, 2022.

Part II

In January 2017, the Trump administration announced its so-called Muslim ban, which was challenged by the ACLU and was revised and reissued a few times before being finalized in March 2017. Iraq was on the initial list and then was dropped from the final declaration, after confidential negotiations that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called an example of “close cooperation” between the two governments. In return for being dropped from the travel ban, Iraq’s government agreed to repatriate Iraqis that the United States wanted to deport. Suddenly, the decades-old mutual understanding about Iraqi deportation was over.

Then, weeks after the travel ban went into effect, the U.S. government launched a coordinated effort to arrest and deport any Iraqis with final orders of deportation. Before dawn on June 11, 2017, ICE vans were joined by state police from Michigan and Ohio, SWAT teams, and what appeared to be the fullest possible complement of law enforcement personnel and vehicles, for a completely unanticipated storm into hundreds of Detroit-area homes.

By early afternoon, people began protesting at the Detroit ICE office. Family members, activists, and lawyers tried to understand what the sudden change in policy meant. There was a rumor that the government planned to immediately deport all three hundred of the people arrested that day, which seemed a logistical impossibility. No one had ID with them, and certainly no one had Iraqi paperwork or passports. On a human level, it was confounding to think that these hundreds of men with Michigan accents and habits could ever slip into Iraq unnoticed. Tattoos, verboten in Iraq and common among Detroiters, were an instant giveaway, and would put almost all of these men in immediate danger. Muslim men may have fared slightly better than Chaldeans, but they would still face the suspicion that they were involved in spying for the U.S. There was no assurance that the Iraqi government would shield deportees from violence once they were repatriated. No one arrested that day had much chance of surviving in Iraq.

The ACLU of Michigan quickly went to work. In days, the organization built a class-action lawsuit centered on Sam Hamama, a Bloomfield Hills, Michigan grocer who had lived in the U.S. since his family fled Iraq in the late 70s. In the early 80s, while driving late at night in Detroit, Hamama got into a dispute with another driver and, to intimidate him, showed his gun—unloaded but also unlicensed—out the window. He had been charged with three felonies.

Many of the men arrested in 2017, in fact, were party store workers or owners who had felonies related to unregistered firearms. Any transaction at a party store in Detroit takes place on either side of bulletproof plexiglass, and guns are endemic in Detroit’s culture. Cash flowed through the party store ecosystem, making the stores targets for robberies. Working in a party store in the 80s and 90s without a gun would have been naïve.

The attorneys on the case pulled off a near-miracle that summer. The rumors had been correct: The Trump administration had indeed chartered two planes and planned to fly several hundred Iraqi-born Michiganders back to Baghdad without identification, money, or plans for their landing. Federal judge Mark Goldsmith issued an emergency order June 27, 2017, to halt the planes’ departure. The detained Iraqis would remain detained while the ACLU and U.S. Department of Homeland Security sorted out their differences in court.

Most of the Iraqis who had been detained sought lawyers to help with their individual cases, which included minor drug offenses, decades-old nonviolent infractions, immigration matters, and a few violent crimes. Their thinking was that if they could resolve the pending issues on their records, they could be removed from the final deportation list. In more than a few cases, languishing paperwork was the real issue.

Immigration lawyers and criminal lawyers were hired, as hundreds of Iraqi-born men were sent to county jails and private prisons from Battle Creek to Youngstown to Port Huron to Sault Ste. Marie. Few were near their families in metro Detroit. Sometimes, inmates were shifted between facilities without notice.

After he was detained in June 2017, Peter hired Ed Bajoka, a Chaldean criminal and immigration lawyer who took on dozens of clients that summer. Peter and Bajoka worked together on a strategy to address Peter’s unresolved criminal record and set him free.

Then came bad news: In August, while Peter was in Youngstown, Mimi learned she had breast cancer. He couldn’t be with her. Visiting him would be costly in gas and tolls, and in any case, she wasn’t feeling well enough for such a long drive. Their nineteenth wedding anniversary approached. They’d spent eight months apart.

Finally, they heard news in the ACLU case: Given the long-term detention of so many still sorting out their legal situations, the ACLU argued that at six months, incarceration met the threshold for “indefinite,” and that indefinite detention is not legal. The law allows the government to detain someone when there is a timeline for their day in court or for their deportation, but it’s not permissible to keep people on hold indefinitely. Judge Goldsmith’s second crucial order in this case arrived on the second day of 2018, and Homeland Security had forty-five days to offer all the detained a hearing for immediate release. The few people who’d been arrested with active pending criminal cases, or with recent violent crimes, were likely to remain locked up longer. Those deemed an imminent danger to society would be held, but from a legal perspective that applied to only a small number of the Iraqis arrested in June. Most everyone would be out in mid-February, to fight their individual cases from home. This meant that Peter would soon see Mimi, so long as his hearing was successful.

Peter’s day in court came via video conference. Instead of being transported seventy-eight miles to Cleveland Immigration Court, Peter saw Judge Christopher R. Seppanen, appointed in August 2017 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, via video. Video was already on the rise in the U.S. court system in the 2010s, as it saves money on such things as prisoner transportation and staff time, but it diminishes the humanity of the process. There is no eye contact. No sense of how a person might walk through the room with deference to the judge, no chance to whisper with their attorney for quick assurance or change of plan or to better understand a legal maneuver.

For this group, the hearings occurred mostly in either Detroit or Cleveland’s immigration court systems and were heard by several different judges. The results varied widely. Sympathetic judges allowed people out on minimal or no bond; others pushed for high bonds.

Bajoka and Peter had pulled together an impressive dossier for their hearing, including letters from Mimi, evidence about his past cases, and the glowing letter from his boss at the restoration company. The file was two inches thick. It felt like a physical embodiment of Peter’s bid for freedom.

When the video feed clicked on to Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a camera had been centered on Peter’s face, so he was visible to the judge and spectators. The camera in Cleveland, in turn, meant to give Peter a view of the courtroom and the judge, was not positioned to allow Peter to see the people in the courtroom. For the duration of his hearing the camera was turned down and focused on Judge Seppanen’s desk. Peter could see the sheaf of papers he’d worked so hard on with Bajoka, and he could see Seppanen’s hands gesturing as he spoke. He never saw the judge’s face.

But he could see this: The judge never opened the thick file with evidence about his virtues, and the hearing concluded with a ruling that Peter was denied the chance for bond at any price. No reason was provided.

“I’m not a jihadist,” Peter said afterward, dumbfounded. “I’m not MS-13. Why can’t he see who I am?”

Peter remained in Youngstown for four more months before being moved to a Michigan county jail in Port Huron. Through 2018, he and Bajoka soldiered on with the case. The ACLU of Michigan pursued their own class action case, making incremental wins and experiencing little losses along the way.

In early 2018, I tried to contact Peter after he was moved out of Youngstown, but he was under more restrictive communication measures at the St. Clair County Jail, where they charged inmates an exorbitant fee to make calls. Meanwhile, Mimi’s expensive treatment had them in a financial emergency. And the visiting system was difficult to navigate, too, even for someone like me with more resources than the typical family. I couldn’t manage to see him, but I was sure he was there. A detainee I interviewed there confirmed it. “The redhead, right?”

The good news for the detainees: by the summer of 2018, very few people arrested two years earlier had actually gone back to Iraq. I heard about only two individuals who opted to return voluntarily, rather than await their fate in a detention center. After allegations that ICE officers at Steward, Georgia detention center were coercing inmates into stating in writing their desire to return to Iraq, the ACLU of Michigan filed a motion that appeared to stop such interference.

Most of those detained in June 2017 had eventually been successful in reopening their old criminal and immigration cases, which were being resolved in their favor. The ACLU might not have won an overwhelming absolution for everyone, but they did put the brakes on the Iraqi deportation process. Even Peter was finally released, with Bajoka’s help.

In a video Mimi took that December 2018 day, Peter walks out of the St. Clair County Jail with two plastic garbage bags of his belongings. Behind the camera, Mimi is ebullient. Peter drops the bags mid-stride and puts his right hand on his heart, beaming, walking directly toward the camera.

Peter reached me on Facebook in early 2019 and let me know he was home, with Mimi.

He’d gone back to work at the restoration company. ICE had issued him an electronic tether as a condition of his release. It was worn on his ankle, and he didn’t feel it was a great impediment physically, though it was a constant reminder of the in-between place where he found himself. Mimi was in cancer recovery, and Peter’s son was a dad, too. Peter, fifty now, was a grandfather.

But quietly, over the summer of 2019, Iraqis began to be deported.

If 2017’s fears had been of a shock-and-awe style mass deportation, 2019’s fears were about something more calculated, like a cat burglar heist. ICE seemed to individually select people for deportation who had little or spotty legal representation or whose cases were complicated to argue. One of these was a man named Jimmy Aldaoud.

Jimmy was forty-one when he was deported. Records are unclear about whether he had come to Detroit as an infant—as the U.S. government claims—or whether he was born in a Michigan hospital in 1978, as Jimmy told me. He has also said to other Iraqi inmates that he was born in Greece, in a refugee camp. In any event, his parents, and any record of his birth, are gone. Most of his life, Jimmy suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, as well as diabetes, and was homeless. When I spoke to him by phone in 2018, he was strident about some parts of his criminal case, confused about others. His criminal case was for a nonviolent suburban Detroit garage break-in. As far as I could tell, his primary struggle was his mental health.

ICE picked him up in June 2019, and days later Jimmy landed in the Najaf airport, in central Iraq—no money, no passport, no Arabic language skills, no family in Iraq. He didn’t have food or access to it. He didn’t have any of the medications he took for his mental and physical conditions. Najaf, 100 miles from Baghdad, is one of two most holy cities for Shiite Muslims and is home to thousands of pilgrims at any given time. Objectively, it’s one of the least safe places for Christians on the planet. Jimmy was Chaldean and had a cross tattooed on his forearm.

Jimmy lived on the streets of Baghdad in the summer, and someone there posted a video of him on Facebook looking desperate and hungry. “I’m here now,” he says in the video. “I don’t understand the language. I’ve been sleeping in the street. I’m diabetic. I take insulin shots. … I’ve been throwing up, throwing up, sleeping in the streets, trying to find something to eat. I got nothing over here, as you can see. I was kicked in the back a couple days ago. I was sleeping on the ground. He claimed it’s his property. I begged him. I said, please sir, I’ve never seen this country.” About seven weeks after he was deported, Jimmy was dead. Bajoka posted about the death on Facebook on August 7, 2019, including this final line: “Rest In Peace Jimmy. Your blood is on the hands of ICE and this administration.” After working to return Jimmy’s remains to Michigan’s ninth district, Rep. Andy Levin attributed the death to a “diabetic crisis.”

The Chaldean Community Foundation held a vigil and press conference for Jimmy in mid-August 2019. Attorneys present encouraged anyone in the room eligible for deportation to keep an international SIM card with them at all times so that if they were deported, they could insert the card into an Iraqi cell phone and try to get a message back to the U.S.  I bumped into Peter at the vigil. I was in a folding chair up front, and he stood with his arms crossed over his chest in the rear. He wore all white athletic clothes and shoes. He looked antsy, ready to move at a moment’s notice. I asked if he was okay.

“Canada, I’m thinking,” is all he said. His tone was friendly, but he walked away quickly.

Peter went dark on Facebook, and by that time, early fall 2019, his lawyer, Bajoka, hadn’t heard a word from him. More Iraqis had been deported. I assumed Peter had been, too.

The young adults of Detroit have long known Windsor, Ontario, as a special destination. The legal drinking age in the province, a few minutes from Detroit, is nineteen. It’s a short trip, and an easy one. Up until just before Covid-19 restrictions began, crossing the border cost $5 each way and could take as little as ten minutes, including a visit with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

In the fall of 2019 Peter had continued to make his ICE visits, upped to once a week instead of twice a year. They were not pleasant. “Certain immigration officers had issues with certain people, so they would pick on them a lot,” Peter said. “There’s me and a couple other guys they had reporting every week. Literally insulting us, belittling us, pushing us into where we can blow up and say something wrong so they can have reason to detain us.”

“You know, I’ve watched these movies from the 30s and the 40s about how the Germans would treat people, the Jewish community and the minorities,” he said. “It’s almost there. It’s almost… there was certain ones who are almost there, honest to God.”

In February 2020, two years after I first met him, Peter and I agreed to meet at a branch of the Windsor, Ontario public library. I drove across the Ambassador Bridge. It was freezing and gray outside, and I found Peter in a big parka, sitting in the library’s reading room. He was placid and hopeful, different than I had ever seen him. He was living in Canada.

Peter had met at 7 a.m. on November 6, 2019, with the Canadian immigration office.

“I was talking to this attorney over here for three months before I made this move,” he said.  He hadn’t warned Bajoka, his Detroit lawyer. “I didn’t want him to be involved in whatever. Because I knew that my immigration officer was going to find a way to punish him, too.”

He felt certain he could be deported to Iraq if he stayed in the U.S., even under a Democratic successor to Trump. And he was certain he wouldn’t survive deportation. Peter is one of many people who told me their greatest fear about returning is that they’d be beheaded, a common form of religiously motivated violence.

Sitting across a wooden library table from me in 2020, he told me how he had dealt with his security ankle bracelet, “I waited until the battery was dead. It had a three-hour battery life. So, I didn’t charge it, and I waited until midnight, and at five o’clock I made the decision to go,” he said.  “I stayed up all night, then I cut it. It’s like hard plastic rubber. I cut it with scissors. I threw it out, and I just went straight to the border.”

Just before cutting the bracelet he had made one final stop— his old neighborhood, Chaldean Town.  “And I cut it right in front of the house where we lived, where I grew up. I was over there in the Seven Mile area, like Woodward area. That’s where I grew up, and I knew that I’m never going to see that area again. I just wanted to see it one last time. Then I went straight to the bridge, with my wife in my car,” he said. He told Border Patrol he had an appointment with Canadian Immigration. The trip, like all Detroit-Windsor crossings, was easy.

The next day, Peter’s immigration officer called him. Peter told the man he was out of the country. “He basically cussed me out and told me, ‘Good riddance,’ and he hopes everybody like me is gonna be back either locked up or in Iraq.”

The same officer called Bajoka that day, too, accusing him of encouraging Peter to cut his tether and flee. “Of course, I did no such thing,” Bajoka told me.

By the time I met with him in February 2020 in Windsor, Peter was working his way, successfully, through the Canadian immigration system. He’d picked up a driving job that supported him and helped him pay the mortgage on his house in Michigan. Mimi’s final reconstructive surgery in her cancer treatment was scheduled for March. The plan was for her to finish her treatment, then sell the house. She would move to Canada when the loose ends of their lives in Detroit were tied. In the meantime, the trip to visit him was short and easy. She’d go once a week.

Peter and I sat at the library for a few hours, catching up. I was audio recording our conversation, but we were near a restroom and every time someone used the thunderous hand dryer our words were swallowed up. People interrupted us several times, usually to ask him for directions. I told him he apparently looked Canadian now, just before a blind man using a white cane approached and asked Peter if he would mind helping him to the men’s room. He leapt up to assist, almost tipping the library chair backward as he did.

When they returned, we walked outside for a bit in the light sleet and monotone gray of February. We thought the next month, March of 2020, would bring better weather and we could chat outside. He expected to have furthered his job search and his Canadian immigration process by then, too.

I haven’t seen him since.

On March 18, 2020, Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced their mutual decision to close the land border between their nations, an unprecedented agreement that affected the 5,500 miles shared between the U.S. and Canada. Essential healthcare workers, students and commercial drivers were exempt. Spousal visits were not. Meanwhile, due to Covid-19, Mimi’s surgery in Detroit was postponed.

There was nothing Mimi or Peter could do to reunite. Even if Mimi were able to make it to Canada, she would be walking away from her health treatments, as well as their mortgage and home. Peter will never be able to return. On Valentine’s Day 2021, when they had been separated just short of one year, he posted a picture of them together on social media, “I appreciate and love you for all you did and give day after day…This is the last picture we took before the border was closed.” They were separated indefinitely, by eleven miles. In August 2021, Canada opened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers, and the U.S. reciprocated in November of the same year.

Had he stayed in Detroit, Peter would still be vulnerable, even under the Joe Biden administration. Though deportations of Iraqis seem to be near zero under the current president, there’s been no policy change regarding Iraqi deportation in the years since the June 11, 2017 arrests under Trump’s Homeland Security Department. Legislation aimed to correct the situation has sputtered. Co-sponsored by U.S. Representative Andy Levin and John Moolenaar in 2019, The Deferred Removal for Iraqi Nationals Including Minorities Act aims to provide a twenty-four-month respite from deportation to Iraqis still navigating their cases. But the bill hasn’t moved past the Judiciary Committee. Iraqis with unresolved cases remain in one kind of purgatory or another. ACLU of Michigan attorneys have estimated that about a thousand people are still at risk.

Lately, I’m having trouble reaching Peter again. I presume that Mimi joined him in Canada late in 2021, though I can’t confirm it. Bajoka tells me Peter is doing what several of his Iraqi clients have done—gone completely silent and trying to move on with life. I’m still Facebook friends with Peter, though his posts are few and far between, and they all seem to speak to his sense of displacement. He most often posts photos and videos taken at Windsor’s Reaume Park, which overlooks the Detroit River and a view of the United States, about four tenths of a mile away. Most have no narration or caption, just a phone camera panning across the choppy blue gray water and Detroit’s skyscrapers. The Ambassador Bridge looms.

One was different, however: A May 2021 photo he posted was taken at the same park, at sunset. Peter, in his trademark white athletic clothes, stands between two men in Detroit Lions and Adidas gear who have Chaldean names. The caption reads, “We’re starting from the bottom & We’re gonna work our way up again in our new Country.” It’s punctuated with a sunglasses emoji and a Canadian flag. Detroit is behind them, and they’re all smiling.