On the Run In America

An Iraqi Christian’s struggle to stay one step ahead of ICE

By Amanda Uhle

Originally printed in The Delacorte Review August 15, 2022.

In winter, the four-hour drive from Detroit to Youngstown is particularly bleak. One February 2018 day I couldn’t discern any contrast between the snow on the farm fields, the faded white of gambrel-roofed barns, and the dove-gray sky behind them. The landscape alternates between fast food and agriculture, the flat road stretching on and on. Drive the length of Ohio and you’ll pay more than $15 in tolls.

For more than a year at that time, dozens of Detroit families made this drive often to see detained fathers, husbands, brothers, and uncles, all held by ICE at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center. I joined them, and on one of my visits, I was scheduled to meet two men for back-to-back interviews. Instead, prison staff decided we could all talk together.

So Peter Abbo—a name I’m using for this story to protect his anonymity—pushed another man’s wheelchair into a tiny metal room, the two of them sharing a single phone on their side of the plexiglass. Peter was bald and pale, a red-orange beard on his chin but no mustache above it. The man in the wheelchair fit a more expected version of “Middle Eastern,” with olive skin and graying black hair. They looked nothing alike but had established a brotherly rhythm, telling each other’s stories, passing the plastic phone between them. Neither man’s family had visited yet. Peter’s wife had breast cancer, I learned, and the other man had a first-grade son.

The man in the wheelchair dominated the phone but if Peter was annoyed, he didn’t betray it. When I indicated that Peter should speak he did so with equal urgency, but also with a self-effacing demeanor. Repeatedly he said, “I take responsibility” or “I did it. I own that,” in explaining his crimes and circumstances.

Peter pressed a family photo and a Xerox of a handwritten letter against the plexiglass for me to read. The judge at his recent hearing had ignored the letter, and Peter wanted me to see the injustice of it, to understand his situation.

These were two of more than 300 Iraqi-born Detroit-area men arrested in a surprise ICE raid back on Sunday morning, June 11, 2017. They both have criminal records, for which they’ve served time. In 2010, the man in the wheelchair worked in a liquor store that sold fake Nike shoes. He was charged with a counterfeiting felony and went to prison. Seven years later, shoeless and in his underwear at six in the morning, he was handcuffed and taken out of his home and into one of the SWAT vehicles idling on his suburban street. More quietly, in the weeks before and after, others were arrested in Michigan and beyond. At the time there were just over 1,300 men in the U.S. who fell into a narrow category of immigration law—Iraqi-born people who had “final orders of deportation.” A few had been convicted of serious crimes. Many more were guilty of non-violent offenses or even simple lapses in paperwork. In the summer of 2017, the Trump administration planned to deport them all.

This was a hard turn in policy. For decades, the U.S. did not deport Iraqis. The situation in that nation was deemed so dangerous that even the George W. Bush administration had understood it to be inhumane to deport Iraqis to Iraq. People who had been “Americanized” by spending time in the U.S. would be in extreme danger there, and their presence was considered a risk to Iraq’s precarious security situation. Citing logistical and humanitarian reasons, the Iraqi government refused to repatriate them anyway.

Under current immigration law, felons generally cannot remain in the U.S. But when an Iraqi-born person was convicted of a felony, he or she would be sentenced according to the courts and then, instead of being deported, as other foreign-born felons might be, they were assigned supervision from ICE—usually monthly or annual check-ins. Officially their status included the designation “under final orders of deportation,” even though the deportation aspect hadn’t happened in a generation. Sending someone back to Iraq was all but unimaginable.

Until it wasn’t.

By mid-afternoon on June 11, 2017, the Detroit ICE office was filled with recently-arrested men. Detroit-area Iraqi families were urgently trying to reach one another and warn them about the surprise raid. Peter Abbo was out on an errand when his wife Mimi answered their door. She called him. According to a letter she sent immigration count, he “…turned himself in within ten minutes of getting my phone call. [He] would never run away from his situation and never has.” Peter and Mimi were both aware of the other Detroit arrests that day. “I knew what was happening. I could have run,” he said. “I faced up to it.”

He came home and ICE agents waiting there arrested him.

It seemed reasonable to Peter Abbo that his situation could be sorted out. He did not have a violent past. He was involved in a weird and spontaneous armed robbery in 1990 and a cocaine deal in 2009, but had served time years ago for both. He had scrupulously kept up with ICE check-in appointments, even as the appointments had become more tense and punitive since Donald Trump had taken office six months before.

The day after the 2016 election that brought Trump the presidency, Peter remembers, he had a scheduled meeting with his immigration officer. He was in the waiting room with several other people when his officer called out across the room: “Hey Peter, did you hear Trump won? All you guys are going to get deported now.”

Peter chose not to answer. He looked down and shook his head.

With a thick Michigan accent, elongating the first “a” in “Arabs,” the officer said, “All you A-rabs. Wait and see.”

More than half of the Iraqis arrested and threatened with deportation in 2017 are neither Arab nor Muslim. Peter is Chaldean, a sect of Catholicism. He grew up speaking Aramaic, not Arabic. A minority group in Iraq, the Chaldean community has endured an epic list of injustices through history, from its formation in the Mesopotamian era to the present. Ostracized and in danger in Iraq, Chaldeans are the primary subset of all Iraqi immigrants to the U.S. The first influx began around 1914 when Henry Ford offered appealing wages of $5 a day for autoworkers. As generations of suffering followed for Chaldeans in Iraq, they continued to slowly immigrate to the Detroit area. At least 250,000 Iraqis are known to have died at the hand of their own government during Saddam Hussein’s brutal twenty-four-year reign. And Chaldeans’ suffering didn’t end with Saddam’s death in 2006. Thirteen years later, in 2019, the Chaldean archbishop announced that Iraqi Christians faced “extinction” unless there was a change in the political situation.

Peter and his twin brother were born in 1969 in Baghdad. The Abbos had come from a village in northernmost Iraq, near the borders of Iran and Turkey. Red-headed, fair-skinned people—like Peter and his twin—are common there, and Chaldean culture is dominant. Peter tells me that during World War I his family and his village helped the Russians and, as a result, “The rest of Iraq has always treated us as traitors.” His parents were forced to move south when the violence against Christians became intolerable. “Kidnapping and killing Christians happened so much,” he said.

His parents thought they’d be safer in the city, but living there was substantially worse. In the north, the Abbos had been almost exclusively among Chaldeans, but in Baghdad they were a minority. The family spoke Aramaic at home. Everyone around them spoke Arabic, and most were Muslim. Peter couldn’t get his footing in school because of the language difference. His sister was harassed because she didn’t wear a hijab. The children were bullied, and Peter has a bright white scar on his forehead from an injury sustained during that time. He touches it when he talks about those years in Baghdad. “They jumped me,” he says quietly. “They threw rocks.”

In 1980 the Iran-Iraq War began. The same year, doctors told Peter’s father that he needed a pacemaker. Fortunately for the family, his father became eligible for a visa to have surgery in the U.S. It would also allow his wife and children a respite from the day-to-day brutality they were facing.

Peter and his twin brother were both given traditional Chaldean names when they were born, but when they moved to America, they took their baptismal names. They learned English. Their father recovered, then began working as a cook for a suburban Detroit banquet hall. Peter’s older sister married and had children. Four years passed. The Abbos overstayed their visitor visa, and, in 1984, left the country in order to re-enter later using proper immigration channels.

Returning to Iraq in the interim was not possible. Peter’s oldest brother – the only immediate family member to have stayed behind – was by 1984 in his fourth year as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq War. It became known in his army unit that his family had moved to the U.S.—an unforgivable stain on his name. Anyone traveling to America, and especially coming back to Iraq after living in America, was assumed to be involved in espionage. His brother learned of a secret and credible plan for his fellow soldiers to torture and kill him; he absconded instead, running into the mountainous wilderness near their home village and surviving on little until he arrived in an Iranian refugee camp.

To avoid endangering other family members or risk torture and death themselves, Peter and his family moved to Casablanca in 1984, living off of their small savings. His now-naturalized adult sister sponsored their re-entry to the U.S. in 1986, when Peter was seventeen.

The Abbos moved to Detroit’s Chaldean Town, near 7 Mile and Woodward Avenue, a neighborhood of densely packed single-family houses without driveways—built before cars—and a small strip of Iraqi bakeries and meat markets. Of the roughly 640,000 Chaldeans worldwide, about 120,000 reside in Metro Detroit. Saddam’s rule had prompted thousands of Chaldean families to flee persecution in Iraq beginning in the late 1970s. Many went to Detroit, and a large number of them settled into jobs operating corner convenience stores as family businesses, as they had done in Iraq. Living in a contemporary food desert, many Detroit residents rely on corner stores for nutrition. The Chaldean Chamber of Commerce says that nine out of ten food stores in the city are owned by Chaldeans. Muslims are forbidden to buy and sell alcohol, creating a business niche for Chaldeans both in Iraq and in the U.S. Chaldeans and their late-night liquor stores, called party stores here, are stalwarts of Detroit culture. Like bodegas in New York, party stores in Detroit are handy for beer or milk or toiletries, and a reliable source of friendly conversation. I spent an afternoon in a West Side Detroit party store in 2019 and its Chaldean owner, who himself spent ten months detained in 2017-18, greeted everyone who entered by name, usually referencing their family. “Terry, we got diapers in for your sister’s baby,” he told one visitor.

In the mid-80s, when Peter was a teenager, Pershing High School, on Detroit’s West Side, proved even less welcoming than Baghdad had been. Detroit is a majority Black city. Most other Middle Eastern kids—who were generally Muslim and had immigrated to Dearborn, adjacent to Detroit—had olive skin and dark hair. Peter was freckled and pale, ginger-haired. Peter said he tried at school and tried not to get distracted by various criminal activities in his neighborhood. “But my head wasn’t in place.”

He was working after school and at night, at a liquor store on 6 Mile and Telegraph. That neighborhood was also a hub for drugs. “I used to look at the dope dealers and think, well, what a life. I mean that’s what you saw,” he said. “Starting in mid-’80s, mid-’90s, there was nothing but cocaine, hard drugs, fighting, robbing, killing.”

On Mother’s Day 1990, when Peter had just turned twenty-one, he was hanging out with several high school friends near a party store. One of them, he says, spontaneously decided to rob someone coming out. The man was holding a bouquet of flowers, presumably for a mother in his life. As he opened the door of his car, a red Corvette, Peter’s friend pulled a gun on the man, took his keys, and got in the car, yelling at Peter to hop in. This had not been Peter’s idea. He says he felt almost as confused as the Corvette owner. But Peter opened the passenger door, grabbed the flowers from the front seat, handed them to the man who’d bought them, and got in the back seat.

“Stupid, stupid,” Peter says, recalling the incident. “Me and another guy jumped in the car and took off.” They drove the Corvette for ten minutes around Chaldean Town. The police asked the victim who stole the car, and the owner reported that one of them was a redhead. “Everyone else with me was African-American. So the police knew exactly who it was,” Peter said. “I am the only red-haired guy in that neighborhood. When they came to me, they asked me whether I was the guy with a gun. I said I was. I couldn’t snitch. In that neighborhood, in that time, you can’t do that. They would have burned my house.”

Peter says he never held the gun. He was holding the bouquet during most of the frenzied interaction. The victim agreed and told law enforcement so at a hearing—that Peter was an accessory and bystander, but not the gunman. “He said that I had nothing to do with it,” Peter said, that he had been “nice enough to give him his flowers back because it was Mother’s Day.”

Peter was offered a plea bargain for a lower charge, unarmed robbery, but when he got the paperwork it was for the original charge, armed robbery. But Peter still agreed to protect his friends, and to protect himself from retribution. “I was young and stupid,” Peter said.

He served one year and three months in a state prison. He’d understood that the plea meant his record would be clean, but he was wrong—those ten minutes in 1990 are indelibly marked on his record as “armed robbery.” His family paid $1,000 for the lawyer who urged him to take the plea deal. It’s unclear whether this lawyer considered the consequences of adding a felony to an immigrant’s record, or if he did understand but assumed that it was irrelevant, since Iraqis were never deported anyway.

Peter spent his twenties back in the same Detroit neighborhood. His girlfriend got pregnant and then left, shortly after their son was born. Peter and his mother raised the boy together. There was never enough money. “It’s so stupid to even say it now,” he tells me, “but I wanted to be a drug dealer. They had money, friends. They were the only ones who didn’t have to worry. I should have wanted to be a doctor, but I didn’t know to want that.”

In 2009, at age thirty-nine, he was arrested for selling cocaine. He hired a friend of a friend’s lawyer, who was Yemeni.

But at the time neither Peter nor his attorney knew that something important had changed in the nineteen years since his 1990 felony for armed robbery. “Janet Reno changed the law back in ’98,” he says. “If you’re not a citizen and catch a felony, you are deportable.” He felt a rush of fear as this fact emerged during the prosecution’s remarks at the hearing. Serving more time in a U.S. prison was a very unpleasant prospect but was nothing compared to being deported to Iraq as a fair-skinned Chaldean who’d spent decades steeped in U.S. culture. He didn’t know Arabic, and he didn’t know anyone in Iraq. Deportation was effectively a death sentence. Even if actually being deported was unheard of, he didn’t want to be put on that list.

During the court recess, Peter sat at the wooden defendant’s table next to his Yemini attorney, who raised his eyebrows and leaned toward Peter’s ear.

Get out, he said.

“He looked at me. He told me, ‘They’re going to lock you up. Send you back.’ I remember that day. Wow. How he looked at me. He said ‘Run.’ And with my, with my dumbness, I believed him. I hate to admit it. It’s nuts. I got up and left. My lawyer said to run, and my dumb ass ran.”

When the court recessed, Peter just walked out and went home. Not for long, though. “It took them a month or two to come get me. ICE came, and I was in for three months, but then the policy with Iraq was that they wouldn’t deport me.” That would change.

Immigration and Naturalization Services arrested Peter in 2009, and he served three months in the Calhoun County Jail in Battle Creek. His trial for the drug charge proceeded – this time with a public defender after he parted ways with the Yemini attorney. In January of 2011, he was sentenced to thirty-two months in prison and four years of probation. He served about thirty months in state prison. After his release, he reported to ICE every six months. Like all Iraqi immigrants with final orders of deportation, he was assigned an immigration officer whose job was to check up with an individuals’ employment and housing situations and monitor them to be sure they were accountable, with no criminal activity. They could be hard. “The ICE people, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Peter says. “A few are okay, normal. Most of them, it seems like they’re there because they want to show you their power, to disrespect you. They call you liar, call you piece of shit, Arab.”

Peter worked for a disaster cleanup company at the time, entering homes and businesses after destructive events such as fires and floods, and even crimes. “We would go to burnt, damaged properties, water-damaged properties, and we’d tear them down and rebuild them,” he says.

His boss would put him on the phone or in front of customers whenever possible because, he says, he was the friendliest, most outgoing man on the crew. His boss wrote a letter in support of his release in 2018, telling the immigration court that Peter is “hardworking, trustworthy, a team player, and a huge asset to our organization. He has always been reliable…we continually receive positive comments about his work ethic and personality from many of our clients.”

Because of his light skin and red hair, Peter says, co-workers often took it for granted he was white. A surprising number of them, he says, were allied with white supremacy groups and assumed that he’d be sympathetic. He wasn’t. “They thought I was thinking the same way, so they’d say things about the Hispanic people, about Jewish people. They hate Jewish people more than anything.”

“They’re all thinking it’s going to be a race war,” Peter said. He makes an upside-down “okay” hand gesture, now associated with white supremacists, and says, “This is how they identify each other, how they say white power. They’re signaling.” They sometimes signaled him that way, Peter said, because of his looks. “I’m thinking, Honest to God, this is everywhere. This is ugly.”

Peter has been married to Mimi since 1999. (For her privacy and Peter’s, Mimi is not her real name.) She’s also from a Chaldean family, though she was born in Detroit, and she is kind and beautiful, with long hair and a wide-open smile. The couple tried for a baby, and she miscarried several times. Years passed. They adopted dogs. Mimi worked in a hair salon and started a cookie business. In 2015, a daughter was born, prematurely, and lived only eight days, leaving behind a sadness that still reverberates.

In 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president, they noticed their Chaldean community rallying behind him. “I am my aunt’s favorite nephew,” Peter says with a smile. “She’s very religious, and she started telling me about Trump. The lobbyists had started influencing the Chaldean churches, and they told their members, ‘You have to vote Trump. He’s helping us.’” Peter disagreed with his aunt and told her Trump was a con artist. “I’ve never ever seen her so mad at me.”

In July 2016, at the Republican National Convention, Trump accepted the party’s nomination and delivered a particularly xenophobic speech. At one point he said something that directly addressed Peter’s situation: “Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.” Trump promised deportations, construction of the Southern U.S. border wall, and tightened immigration restrictions.

Like the Michigan Chaldean community, Peter’s co-workers were energized about Trump. “I saw it right away, what Trump was giving them,” Peter says. “I was afraid.”

The rhetoric that had particularly resonated with Peter’s aunt and her church was Trump’s promise, again and again, to help persecuted Middle Eastern Christians. It paid off for him. Traditionally Democratic, Michigan favored Trump by 10,000 votes, the smallest margin of any state, but enough to have him carry all of its electoral votes. A key part of that support came from Macomb County, a Chaldean stronghold. Mostly white and blue-collar, the county is a political bellwether. It swung right in 2016. (In 2020, Joe Biden handily defeated Trump by 154,000 votes in the state of Michigan–a margin fifteen-times higher than the previous election. But Macomb County remained solidly red.)

On election night 2016, Peter went to sleep when the tallying was still underway. At 2 a.m. Mimi woke him, crying, saying Trump had won.

“I’m f---ed,” he said.

Continue reading Part II of this article here..