NORTHAMPTON — Lucio Perez is not the only local, undocumented resident Immigration and Customs Enforcement has sought to deport following a regularly scheduled check-in.
Niberd Alzendi Abdalla, a longtime Hampshire County resident who has been in the United States for more than 40 years, was arrested and detained on June 8. He currently sits in the Suffolk County House of Correction, where he has been held since June.
“He’s still in detention, his health is still deteriorating in detention and we are procedurally pursuing a number of pathways to get him out of detention,” said Buz Eisenberg, Abdalla’s attorney from Northampton.
Abdalla, who was born in Iraq, has said that he had applied for legal status several times over the years, but failed to realize that he needed to follow up. From 1987 until 2003, he said he had been able to update his work visa each year, but then the Iraq war began, and in 2003 immigration authorities arrested him when he went to renew his work visa. When they released him, they instructed him to report in regularly.
Abdalla had been reporting to ICE twice yearly for the past seven years, and under the Obama administration, immigrants like Abdalla weren’t a priority for authorities. But under President Donald Trump, cases like Abdalla’s have been made a priority. It was during his scheduled appointment with ICE that officials arrested him again this year.
Abdalla’s case was thrown a lifeline in July when a federal judge in Michigan blocked the deportation of more than 1,400 Iraqis in the United States who have a final removal order from immigration authorities.
“While cost and efficiency in administering the immigration system are not illegitimate governmental concerns, such interests pale to the point of evaporation when weighed against the potential lethal harm Petitioners may suffer,” the judge in the case, Mark Goldsmith, said.
Because of the injunction, each Iraqi detainee will now have a 90-day stay from the time the government provides two key immigration records needed to reopen their cases: their “Alien Files” and “Recording of Proceedings.” Eisenberg said ICE is expected to produce Abdalla’s records this week, and that the government is barred from deporting him while Eisenberg files his appeal.
ICE spokesman Khaalid Walls said Monday in an email that Abdalla would remain in detention until he is removed from the United States.
Complicating Abdalla’s case further, Eisenberg said, is the fact that his Kurdish background could make him a political target.
On Sept. 25, a large majority of voters in Iraqi Kurdistan approved secession from Iraq, triggering conflict with government troops who retook territory that Kurdish forces had gained in recent years. That backdrop has escalated an already tense political climate for Iraq’s Kurds, a minority that has historically faced persecution at the hands of Iraq’s central government.
“Those geopolitical forces are part of what we are explaining to the immigration courts,” Eisenberg said.
In an Aug. 4 interview with the Gazette from jail, Abdalla said he fears death in Iraq. He escaped Iraq after facing violence from the Ba’athist party, dodging bombs and bullets before ending up as a homeless youth on the streets of New York City in 1975.
Abdalla met his fiancee, Ellen McShane, in Central Park during those years. They fell in love and she got pregnant, but McShane said their two families forbade them from marrying because of their different ethnicities. It was only seven years ago, “through the magic of Facebook,” that the two reconnected, and had planned to get married before Abdalla’s detention.
“The great irony in this case is that the people they’ve arrested like Niberd, like this poor man who is in sanctuary in Amherst, are compliant,” Eisenberg said, adding that Abdalla has no criminal background. “The people they are deporting are not strategically targeted because they pose a danger to America. It’s purely political.”
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.