SEPTEMBER 2022

COVER STORY
ON THE RUN continued from page 20
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-fouryear
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-today
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
More than half of the Iraqis arrested and threatened with deportation
in 2017 are neither Arab nor Muslim… the Chaldean community has
endured an epic list of injustices through history, from its formation
in the Mesopotamian era to the present.
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
ON THE RUN continued on page 24
22 CHALDEAN NEWS SEPTEMBER 2022