Iraqis and supporters rallied outside a Detroit courthouse Wednesday as a hearing began on a lawsuit that seeks to stop the government from deporting more than 100 Iraqi nationals who were recently rounded up. Carlos Osorio/AP
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Griffin
Paul Jackson, June 22, 2017
With
the fate of 199 Iraqi nationals on hold while a Detroit court hears a lawsuit,
a group of evangelical leaders has sent the Trump administration a simple
message: Don’t deport Christians into genocide.
“We
write urgently and with grave concern that Christians will be removed from the
United States to face potential persecution, and even death, in the Middle
East,” begins an open
letter addressed to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and signed by
the seven leaders of the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT).
The
letter calls on the Trump administration to “exercise the discretion available
under the law to defer the deportation of Chaldeans who pose no threat to US
public safety to Iraq.” It also asks for the same considerations for Iraqis of
other faiths.
The
signatories include Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of
Evangelicals; Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief; Samuel Rodriguez,
president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; Russell
Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern
Baptist Convention; Shirley V. Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian
Colleges and Universities; Jo Anne Lyon, ambassador and general superintendent
emerita of The Wesleyan Church; and Hyepin Im, president and CEO of Korean
Churches for Community Development.
The
letter comes a week after scores of Iraqi Christians living around Detroit were
plucked from their homes and cars—some on their way to church—and shackled by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. A similar story unfolded at
the same time among Iraqi Kurds
around Nashville. Within a few days, more than 100 Iraqi nationals were
detained, most of them bussed across state lines to a holding facility in
Youngstown, Ohio.
Their
next journey threatens to take them much farther from home.
More
than 1,400 Iraqis in the United States are listed for potential deportation. An
estimated 300 of them are Chaldeans, an ethnoreligious group comprised
primarily of Iraqi Catholics.
For
most of the past decade, deportation to Iraq was never a possibility because
the Iraqi government refused to grant papers to repatriate deportees from the
US. That changed when, as part of a deal to be removed from President Donald
Trump’s seven-country travel ban, Iraq agreed to once again begin accepting
deportees—something the war-ridden nation hadn’t done since 2010.
The
first and only plane so far transporting deportees from the US to Baghdad took
eight Iraqis in April.
With
the weekend wave of detainments, however, the prospect of more one-way flights
has taken on new urgency.
“Now
everyone is riled up because it’s a crisis,” said Tiara Shaya, the niece of
military veteran Nahidh Shaou who came to the US when he was five years old.
Shaou was detained by ICE last September immediately upon finishing a
three-decade sentence for shooting and wounding a police officer.
Prior
to the massive roundup last weekend, Iraqis were being picked up by ICE at a
steady clip, but not enough to inspire much activism—even within the close-knit
Iraqi community in Detroit. Shaou’s imprisonment
and looming deportation had hardly registered with political
representatives and legal activists.
A
mounting defense
“By
5:30 in the morning on Sunday, I was awakened by a phone call by a woman
yelling and crying,” said Joseph T. Kassab, president and founder of the Iraqi
Christians Advocacy and Empowerment Institute. “I couldn’t even recognize her
name, because she couldn’t compose herself to tell me who she is.”
The
woman’s husband, a father of four and a businessman in Michigan, had been
arrested by ICE. She didn’t know where officers had taken him.
“Since
then, the phone never stopped ringing,” said Kassab. “Each one of them told me
a story about how brutal and how bad their situation is. To me, this is
inhumane.”
Wisam
Naoum, a finance lawyer and community leader providing legal aid to deportees
and their families in Detroit, recited similar horror stories. “A guy got
nabbed as he’s going into church. He was going to his daughter’s baptism and
was picked up on his way in.”
Among
those detained over the weekend are Usama “Sam” Hamama, a 54-year old father of
four; Jihan Asker, a mother of three who has lived in the US since the age of
5; and Moayad Jalal Barash, the sole breadwinner for his four children. Those
in ICE custody—at least 199
Iraqi immigrants arrested since May—include men and women; Arabs and Kurds;
Shia and Sunni Muslims, but mostly Christians. Nearly all of them arrived in
the US decades ago. Being forcibly returned to Iraq, a country blighted with
the horrors of war and the terror of the Islamic State, would put them all in
grave danger.
The
gravity of that danger, and the breadth of ICE’s sweeping raids, has begun to
stir influencers to action.
In
the aftermath of the weekend raids, six congressmen from Michigan penned
a letter to Kelly speaking on behalf of those arrested in the sweep. In
part, the letter reads:
Individuals,
most of whom are Chaldean but include Muslims as well, will be placed in great
danger if deported to Iraq. Because of the horrors perpetrated against the
Catholic Chaldean population in Iraq, these individuals could be stranded in a
country in which they are subject to extreme jeopardy.
The
vast majority of these individuals came to the US legally long ago but are
subject to deportation now because they violated their visa restrictions by committing
crimes of various degrees, or for other reasons. Those that committed crimes
have, to the best of our knowledge, served any sentence and completed any
parole. These individuals have put down roots. Many have married, helped raise
families, worked hard, opened small businesses, and paid their taxes.
Most
have no relatives in Iraq because they, or the families that brought them to
America as children, left the country decades ago. The traditional Chaldean
areas in Iraq have been uprooted, destroying much of what would have been left
of “home” for the Chaldeans.
Two
of the letters signatories, Sandy Levin and Brenda Lawrence, appeared
at a rally last Friday in Detroit protesting the arrests.
A
nearly identical letter, delivered to Vice President Mike Pence by former
senator Bob Dole, was signed by more than a dozen Chaldean, Assyrian, and
Jewish leaders, as well as politicians and a retired US Army colonel. The
recent message from the evangelical figureheads turned the heat up still
further.
“This
is wrong, wrong, wrong. Deporting these Iraqi Christians is nothing less than a
death sentence,” Moore told Baptist Press. “I cannot understand how our government
could act so cruelly and counter-productively to some of the most vulnerable
people in the world. These deportations should be stopped immediately. We
should be protecting these imperiled people, not surrendering them up for
execution.”
Even
prominent evangelist Franklin Graham, a vocal defender of President Trump, said
what he’d read about the roundup was “very disturbing,” and encouraged the
President to “have someone investigate these cases thoroughly.” In his statement
on Facebook, Graham, leader of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association and Samaritan’s Purse, said, “I don’t know all the details, but I
would encourage our president to give great consideration to the threat to
lives of Christians in countries like Iraq.”
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