EASTHAMPTON — A longtime Hampshire County man who has lived in the U.S. for more than 40 years faces deportation to his native Iraq after customs officials arrested and detained him in June.
Advocates for Niberd Alzendi Abdalla, 57, said the actions disregard his serious health issues, and say his Kurdish ethnicity would put him in danger in his home country.
Attorney Buz Eisenberg said Abdalla lived in Northampton and cared for his elderly parents in Easthampton before Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials detained him on June 8 during a regularly scheduled appointment. Abdalla, who fled Iraq and came to the U.S. when he was 15, reported to ICE every six months for the past seven years.
“He was shocked when they brought him into custody and he’s been in jail ever since,” Eisenberg said of Abdalla’s detention at the Suffolk County House of Correction. “He always trusted the right thing would happen.”
The deportation proceedings sent tremors throughout the community, the first of which were felt with an ICE visit to Hampshire Heights in Northampton in late May. The agents’ visit prompted a response from the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and the ACLU Immigrant Protection Program of Western Massachusetts, which launched out of Northampton in April.
An ICE spokesman did not respond to several requests for comment Monday.
Eisenberg, who connected with his client through the new Immigrant Protection Program, said Abdalla was poised to finally fulfill a relationship with Ellen McShane, the mother of his 37-year-old son, when he was detained. He said her father had disapproved of the match because of Abdalla’s Arab descent, and so they never married.
Eisenberg said their love never died, and after decades spent caring for their aging parents while in failed marriages, they’d finally reached a point when they could bring their lives back together.
“What could have been an epic love story is now awash in tragedy,” he said.
Eisenberg said Abdalla’s family fled Iraq after his father, a government attorney who had prosecuted members of the ruling Ba’athist party, became a target in the 1970s. Abdalla’s brother, an anti-Ba’athist organizer, fled to Germany, where Eisenberg said he died “under suspicious circumstances.”
Eisenberg said Abdalla missed his window to apply for political refugee status in the United States while he was hopping around as a teenager to various construction jobs.
“He came in on a student visa, dropped out, and because he was a child on his own, didn’t realize the importance of renewing his visa,” Eisenberg said.
Aside from the fact Abdalla’s Kurdish background could make him a political target in Iraq, Eisenberg said he has respiratory issues — severe asthma necessitating biweekly steroids, recurrent pneumonia and vocal cord dysfunction — that require a level of attention he can’t get in Iraq. He said officials had to take Abdalla to the hospital for heart palpitations during his first day in detention.
“The consequences could be major,” Eisenberg said after a consultation with Abdalla’s physician at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. “He doesn’t use the word fatal but I think that’s what he means.”
Eisenberg said that to his knowledge, Abdalla has no criminal record. He said Abdalla stands among some 1,450 otherwise law-abiding Iraqi immigrants facing removal — a group for which the ACLU of Michigan successfully bargained for a two-week stay of deportation late last month.
Bill Newman, director of the Western Regional Law Office of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said the U.S. district court in Detroit extended that stay on Friday for an additional two weeks.
Eisenberg said ICE targeted this group of immigrants because they were “an easy get.”
“It’s not because of anything they did,” he said, noting that President Donald Trump’s executive orders effectively abolished the agency’s prioritization of criminals. “It’s because they get 1,400 in one fell swoop.”
Eisenberg said he appealed for a stay of deportation because of Abdalla’s health issues, but that stay was denied.
The Pioneer Valley Workers Center is coordinating a rally on Abdalla’s behalf on Tuesday at 1 p.m. at Northampton City Hall.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.