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 <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> <strong>2022</strong>
Little SCHOLARS PRESCHOOL EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRA M NOW ENROLLING! LIMITED SPOTS AVAILABLE Our preschool day focuses on student centered education with support from our bilingual staff. Students will experience hands on lessons with a focus on play and social interaction. PRESCHOOL (AGES 3-5) MONDAY — FRIDAY 9:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M. AGES: • 3 yr. - Will attend 2 days a week. • 4-5 yr. - Will attend 3 days a week. FAMILY RESOURCE HOUR APPOINTMENTS MONDAY — FRIDAY 2:00 P.M. — 4:30 P.M. Katie Geekie Teacher Anni Frangulian Teaching Assistant For more information, please contact Katie Geekie at katie.geekie@chaldeanfoundation.org or call 586-722-7253. <strong>SEPTEMBER</strong> <strong>2022</strong> CHALDEAN NEWS 25
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