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 <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
CITIZENSHIP PREPARATION NOW ENROLLING FOR FALL CLASSES OCTOBER 4 – DECEMBER 15 Tuesdays and Thursdays MORNING SESSIONS 9:30 am – 12:00 pm OR EVENING SESSIONS 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm REGISTRATION WILL BEGIN ON <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> 26, <strong>2022</strong> To register please call CCF at 586-722-7253 $40 registration fee STORY continued from page XX CHALDEAN COMMUNITY FOUNDATION 3601 15 MILE ROAD, STERLING HEIGHTS, MI 48310 586-722-7253 CHALDEANFOUNDATION.ORG <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> <strong>2022</strong> CHALDEAN NEWS 23
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