Chemistry professor gets kids ready for school — then is arrested by ICE

On a recent morning, Syed Ahmed Jamal was getting ready to take his daughter to school when he was stopped outside his home in Lawrence, Kan.

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were on his front lawn. Before Jamal, 55, could say goodbye to his wife and three children, the agents detained him and led him away in handcuffs.

The arrest of a “beloved Lawrence family man, scientist and community leader” came as a shock to Jamal’s friends and neighbors in the Kansas City area, where he has lived since arriving in the United States on a student visa from Bangladesh more than 30 years ago. He would go on to also attain graduate degrees in molecular biosciences and pharmaceutical engineering, then settle in Lawrence to raise a family.

Along the way, he switched from student visas to an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers, then back to a student visa when he enrolled in a doctoral program, his family said. At the time of his arrest, Jamal was on a temporary work permit, teaching chemistry as an adjunct professor at Park University in Kansas City and conducting research at various local hospitals.

In a statement to the Washington Post, an ICE official said the agency “continues to focus its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.” Asked whether Jamal had done anything that would have placed him in this category, the official said that, “as ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan has made clear, ICE does not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

Jamal’s arrest is also the latest example of ICE agents abruptly targeting noncitizens with no criminal record who have, in the past, been allowed to stay in the country because they were seen as contributing positively to society, according to Jeffrey Y. Bennett, an immigration lawyer who filed a request to stay Jamal’s deportation on Friday.

Shortly after he was elected, Donald Trump vowed to immediately deport 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants after his inauguration, saying the focus would be on those with criminal records.

During the first year of Trump’s presidency, however, many immigrants who were previously allowed to stay found themselves swept up by ICE, such as in the recent case of a Michigan father, too old to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, who was deported to Mexico after three decades in the United States. In January, ICE targeted 7-Eleven stores in a nationwide sweep for unauthorized workers and, later that month, detained a Polish doctor and greencard holder who had lived in the United States for nearly 40 years.

“The first wave (of people getting detained) was right after President Trump was elected and came into office. For a few months everyone was basically in hysteria. There were lots of incidents of people getting picked up coming out of the courtroom where they appeared for (check-ins), at churches, jails, schools,” Bennett said. “It kind of tapered down over the summer. Now I’m starting to hear over the local attorney listservs, I’m seeing an uptick on the same thing.”