Sent ‘home’

In essence, Jimmy Aldaoud was what lawyers call low-hanging fruit. The 41-year-old Detroit suburb resident had more than 20 convictions, the most notable for assault and stealing power tools from a garage in 2012. Family and friends say doctors believed he was bipolar with schizoaffective disorder, plus he was a diabetic.

In the eyes of immigration authorities, the Iraqi national was ripe for deportation. While his parents and an older sister long ago became U.S. citizens, Aldaoud remained a permanent legal resident, homeless and troubled, and subject to removal. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him in late May and put him on a commercial flight to Iraq, along with about six others. Aldaoud appeared a rank criminal element lawfully deported, helping to justify hundreds of ICE arrests and deportations continuing this summer.

But Aldaoud’s case instead has been sensationalized after family members disclosed on Aug. 7 that he had died in Iraq, apparently unable to obtain insulin there and succumbing to diabetes. His death rocked Detroit’s Iraqi Christian community, where Aldaoud grew up. Cases like his have been pending since 2017 when ICE raided Chaldean sites and detained 114 Iraqi Americans who’ve lived in the United States for decades, threatening to deport them to a country where Christians like them continue to face genocide.

Instead of paving the way for more removals as the Trump administration seeks to tighten U.S. immigration policy, Aldaoud’s fate is likely to lead to further legal action to halt deportations, and to a congressional inquiry into cruelty and mishandling by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

When immigration authorities arrested Aldaoud in May, they put him on a commercial flight to Najaf instead of Baghdad. A city of 1 million people south of the Iraqi capital, Najaf is one of the holiest cities for Muslim Shiites, and a center for anti-American hostility. U.S. forces fought a major battle at Najaf during the 2003 invasion. Revered Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim was killed there in a 2003 car bombing, sparking the country’s Sunni-Shiite insurgency.

Aldaoud, who did not speak Arabic, arrived in Najaf without a passport or other documents, with only a little insulin, and no community. There are no Assyrian or Chaldean Christians in Najaf. He lived on the streets, unable to navigate checkpoints or government services without identification. In a video message sent to family and friends in Detroit just before his death, he said he was sick, out of insulin, and had been beaten for sleeping on someone’s property.

Besides questions about why he was sent to Najaf, attorneys involved in the Aldaoud case told me U.S. authorities did not have to send him to Iraq at all. A third country had agreed to accept Aldaoud—but U.S. officials refused.

Third-country repatriation is not uncommon when deportees cannot safely return to their own country. “In diplomacy-speak, the United States has to make the request and a third country can accept,” explained Steven Oshana, executive director of A Demand For Action, a Washington-based advocacy group working on behalf of Iraqi victims of genocide since ISIS invaded Iraq in 2014. “We had a commitment from a third country, but the administration was not interested.”

Oshana would not name the country, due to ongoing cases he hopes can receive third-country repatriation, and DHS has not responded to requests for comment.

Oshana said cases for Iraqi nationals could be handled differently: “The cruelty is the point for ICE, it seems,” said Oshana. “We had a third country ready to accept him, and they insisted he go back to Iraq. For so long we’ve been arguing that returning these people to Iraq would be a death sentence, and in this case it was.”

Oshana said cases for Iraqi nationals could be handled differently: “The cruelty is the point for ICE, it seems,” said Oshana. “We had a third country ready to accept him, and they insisted he go back to Iraq. For so long we’ve been arguing that returning these people to Iraq would be a death sentence, and in this case it was.”

Aldaoud was born in Greece, not Iraq, and immigrated to the United States with his Iraqi parents as part of a refugee resettlement program when he was 15 months old. For nearly four decades he considered himself an American and had never set foot in Iraq.

In 2017 ICE began to detain about 1,400 Iraqis legally residing in the United States but eligible for deportation due to criminal records. Most understood their legal limbo, attorneys told me, and made regular appearances to ICE offices as part of the condition of remaining in America. But in 2017 circumstances changed. The Trump administration, as part of an agreement to remove Iraq from its list of travel ban countries, persuaded Iraqi leaders for the first time to accept deportees.

That June, agents raided a Detroit-area Chaldean church during Mass and restaurants frequented by the U.S. Iraqi Christian community, which numbers nearly 200,000 people in Detroit and dates back several generations. About 114 men were arrested and sent to a detention center in Ohio. Clarence Dass, a Detroit lawyer who was born in the United States to Iraqi parents, at one time handled 25 of the 114 cases. The ACLU also stepped in with a class-action lawsuit, and a federal judge stayed most of the deportations while the cases were adjudicated. Aldaoud, in jail at the time for giving false information to a police officer, was transferred by ICE to the Ohio facility, and his case became part of the ACLU suit.

The raids coincided with Trump efforts directing a coalition battle to defeat ISIS in Iraq, a terrorist group the United States in 2016 had formally declared was committing genocide against Christians. Iraq was too dangerous, attorneys argued, to send back the detainees.

Nearly all of the cases Dass handled have been adjudicated, he said: “All are nearly exactly similar but each has been handled very differently” by authorities.

One of his clients, an Iraqi living more than 30 years in the United States, was convicted of a drug crime and served eight years in prison. Completely rehabilitated, he has a wife and two children and a successful business and is involved in community work through churches and synagogues. Yet in 2017, ICE arrested and detained him based on the drug conviction. Dass sought in court a pardon for the conviction, which was granted by then-Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. With his criminal record expunged, ICE removed the deportation order against him.

Another case involves a man with a 2010 drug conviction who applied for a pardon and did not receive it. He too runs his own business, has a wife and three children, and was detained in 2017. Now free, the deportation order against him remains, “a source of great mental anguish every day,” said Dass.

All currently reside legally in the United States, points out Dass, and currently are productive residents with a 20-30 year history of living in the United States. Yet any could be removed by ICE like Aldaoud, without notice, and sent to Iraq, where they have no ties.

This month an Iraqi official told Reuters news service ICE had rounded up about 100 such Iraqis in the Detroit area, along with Kurdish Iraqis living in Nashville. The official said Iraq would issue travel documents for the deportees if they can be proven “to be ‘Iraqi’ based on our records and investigation.”

Oshana said talks were underway with members of Congress to do more, and several lawmakers expressed an interest in holding hearings in light of Aldaoud’s death. They would also consider legislation to restrict such deportations, particularly to countries where genocide has taken place, and to require U.S. immigration officers to provide six months of needed medication and other necessities in the event of removal.

But Congress and the Trump administration also need to address the ongoing cruelty in breaking up families and upending businesses, leading to lasting economic hardship for such communities. U.S. authorities could resolve many of the Iraqi cases, but instead have used taxpayer funds to detain the Iraqis and litigate nearly every case individually.

News of Aldaoud’s death appeared on Aug. 7, a date Iraqi Christians know well. It’s the anniversary of the 1933 Simele Massacre in northern Iraq, when thousands of Assyrian Christians were killed and more than 60 villages destroyed by Iraqi forces. “The biggest casualty of this entire conflict has been the Christians,” said Dass, “and now, even here, that continues.”