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, <strong>2022</strong>. 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 <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
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