To Naoum, Sunday, June 11, transformed politics for his community. “The community is not going to forget who came to our aid and who didn’t,” he said, referring to the largely silent Michigan Republican establishment. Aside from families being torn apart and middle-aged and old men facing what they perceive to be death sentences, Naoum recognizes that Chaldeans in Michigan have been thrust into uncertainty about their deeply held social and political loyalties. While Kalasho and her team at CODE Legal Aid have been thinking about legal strategy since the raids, Wisam Naoum, the finance lawyer, has been reflecting on the long-term implications they will have on his community. “We’re not happy-go-lucky people anymore,” Robin said. And with almost all of the Iraqis from Michigan still incarcerated, the stress of the passing weeks is taking its toll on family members like Robin, her mother, and her kids. But with immigration courts’ extreme backlog of cases, no one knows when they might get that chance. It’s only if lawyers are able to satisfactorily prove this fearful form of government acquiescence that they will have any chance of saving their clients from deportation. But with that area shrinking after ISIS’s recent battlefield defeats, detained Chaldeans plan to argue that they still face an abundance of threats in Iraq-threats the Iraqi government is not only powerless to stop but that it willfully ignores. The most internationally recognizable threat to Christians in Iraq is ISIS, which vows to eradicate religious minorities, specifically Christians and Aramaic speakers in areas under its control. With cases like Adel’s that have already been denied based on the Convention Against Torture, lawyers are filing motions to reopen based on new evidence of government acquiescence and changes in “country conditions.” And with the preliminary injunction in place, Filipovic, Kalasho, and their team are trying to compile stock research and arguments for all of the individual lawyers to use in their respective immigration court cases. This double burden of proving both the likelihood of torture and the government’s acquiescence to existing torture is the legal struggle for most of the detainees CODE Legal Aid is trying to help, according to Filipovic. In a statement, ICE’s Detroit field office director, Rebecca Adducci, described the raids as an effort “to address the very real public safety threat represented by the criminal aliens arrested.” But according to data collected by CODE Legal Aid, half of the 114 Iraqis arrested in Michigan were convicted of drug-related crimes, and roughly 3 in 4 of nonviolent crimes. Although many of the detainees came as refugees, and most came to the United States legally, almost all committed crimes that made them deportable. This is the situation in which most detained Iraqis have found themselves. And without naturalization, a felony conviction can render immigrants deportable-even refugees. with little money or possessions, the naturalization process-which can cost thousands of dollars and involves taking a test in English-seems out of reach. According to Filipovic, for many non-English-speaking refugees who come to the U.S. He was released on parole after two.Īlthough Adel came to the United States with refugee status and was a legal permanent resident, he never went through the full naturalization process to become a citizen, for which he was eligible starting in 1985. According to his lawyer, Milica Filipovic of CODE Legal Aid, Adel’s arrest three decades ago was “nonviolent, no weapons involved,” adding, “He didn’t know what he was delivering.” At the height of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, the judge sentenced Adel to 3½ to 20 years in prison. His wife gave birth to Robin, their first of five children, in 1981, and in 1987, Adel was arrested on drug transportation charges. (Their last names have been withheld to protect their privacy.)Īdel moved to Michigan with his wife, mother, and siblings as a refugee from a camp in Greece in 1980, after his father and father’s family were murdered during bouts of anti-Assyrian killings in Iraq. One of the people who came into KEYS Grace that night was Robin, whose 67-year-old father, Adel, had been detained. ICE also had a list of about 1,200 more deportable Iraqis who, possibly until now, were never prioritized for deportation. Naoum and Kalasho also later found out that roughly 85 more had been detained around the same time across the country, including a group of Kurds in Tennessee and other Muslims and Christians in New Mexico and Southern California. By the time the raids were finished, Kalasho’s spreadsheet revealed that ICE had detained 114 Iraqis across three counties in Michigan-almost exclusively men, mostly Chaldean.
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