Immigrants desperate to avoid deportation
STERLING HEIGHTS, MICHIGAN: The charter flight left on a Wednesday with eight Iraqis on board. By the following evening, the large Iraqi immigrant community in this Detroit suburb was roiled with rumours about why, with news of the departure morphing as phone calls spun into horror. Some people were talking again about whether they should go into hiding.
The flight on Apr 19, it turns out, was the result of a Trump administration policy that could lead to the deportation of thousands of Iraqis back to a war-torn country many haven’t seen in decades.
In Detroit’s large Iraqi community, the policy shift has sown panic and confusion. In the surburb of Sterling Heights, home to tens of thousands of Chaldean Catholics who are members of Iraq’s ancient Christian minority, there also is a deep sense of irony.
When President Donald Trump rolled out his entry ban initially targeting seven majority-Muslim countries in January, many here applauded, even though Iraq was on the list, because Trump had vowed special protections for Christians. The Chaldeans voted overwhelmingly for Trump,and many saw him as a president who would finally protect the Middle East’s Christians from persecution, prioritise the resettlement of Christian refugees in the United States, and get tough on the Islamic State, which has massacred Shiites as well as Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria. The US government has called the Islamic State campaign of slaughter a genocide, and Chaldeans worry that a return to Iraq will lead to kidnappings and murders.
When Trump in February removed Iraq from the revised version of his ban - now on hold because of court challenges - it was the result of a quiet deal between the two countries. Among promises to add new, unspecified security measures, Iraq, which had for years failed to cooperate with US deportation efforts, also would start accepting people without Iraqi travel documents. The move put approximately 4,400 undocumented Iraqis who have deportation orders at risk of being put on flights out of the country.
Any non- citizen, including legal residents, who commits an “aggravated felony” under US immigration law - a term that includes serious crimes as well as many non-violent offences and misdemeanours - is deportable. The Iraqis who face deportation do not have visas to live in the United States, many of them having lost their green cards because they were convicted of crimes. They fall into a cohort of people President Trump has targeted for removal from the country, regardless of their nationality.
Many of the Chaldeans have been living in the United States for years since first receiving a deportation order.
“There are a lot of Chaldeans in the US who voted for Trump because they wanted him to help the Christians,” said Eman Jajonie-Daman, a Chaldean immigration lawyer and local magistrate judge who is representing several people with deportation orders. “Now they’re telling me, ‘ The Trump administration has betrayed us.’ How could you admit Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria, and yet you want to send (some of) them back to die?”
But many Americans support the idea that non- citizens who commit serious crimes should be deported, said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an organisation that advocates strict immigration control.
“For the most part, criminal aliens need to be deported,” Camarota said, noting that people who fear danger at home can appeal to a US judge. “There are hundreds of thousands of Christians in Iraq today, and some of them do face dangers, but that’s not a reason for us to let criminal aliens stay in the United States. . . . I think most Americans say the safety of the American people has to come first, and that is the reason we deport criminal aliens.”
At the Chaldean Community Foundation, which provides social services to the local immigrant population, the phone hasn’t stopped ringing, the scope of the crisis seeming to expand with each call.
“It’s a very close-knit community, so I’m getting calls from people I haven’t heard from in 20 years,” said Martin Manna, the foundation’s president, referring to those who have been living for years with outstanding deportation orders. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’re in the same situation?’ “When Manna called a meeting on the issue this month, 70 people showed up.
“There were mothers and daughters crying. There were those who don’t know anything about the law and were blaming the government,” said a 55year- old businessman who has lived with a deportation order for seven years after serving a 22-year prison sentence for dealing drugs. He, like many others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from immigration authorities. “‘What do we do with our businesses? Do we sleep at home?’ “he said people asked. “Just a huge panic.”
The existance of the new policy might not have gotten out but for one man’s attorney, who, seeking to halt his client’s deportation, filed a motion in court.
Assistant US Attorney Zak Toomey laid out the new policy and its relationship to Trump’s entry ban in the government’s Mar 21 response to that filing. “Iraq was specifically removed from the list of countries affected by the Executive Order based on its agreement to facilitate repatriation of Iraqi nationals subject to removal orders,” he wrote. “Iraq has agreed to accept Iraqi nationals removed from the United States using a less stringent identity-verification process and without travel documents.”
A representative of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed a “Mar 12, 2017 agreement with the government of Iraq regarding removals” as well as the Apr 19 charter flight that took eight Iraqis to Baghdad. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. By Manna’s count, as many as 350 Chaldeans in the Detroit metro area are at immediate risk of deportation.
Nearly all of them have similar stories: Their families immigrated legally, often fleeing Saddam Hussein’s brutality in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘ 90s.