SEPTEMBER 2022

COVER STORY
ON THE RUN continued from page 22
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
“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.”
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
ON THE RUN continued on page 41
24 CHALDEAN NEWS SEPTEMBER 2022