SEPTEMBER 2022

COVER STORY
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.
ILLUSTRATION BY LÉO HAMELIN
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 backto-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 checkins.
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.
ON THE RUN continued on page 22
20 CHALDEAN NEWS SEPTEMBER 2022