When you foresee a death, there’s no joy in being right. On June 4, I told my colleagues that Jimmy Aldaoud — a medically frail Michigan man who came to the United States in 1979 when he was an infant — was not going to survive. That was the day his sister Rita Bolis called to tell me he had been deported and was sleeping on a bench in an airport in Najaf, Iraq.
Mr. Aldaoud had never been to Iraq. He was born in Greece to Iraqi refugee parents. He had no ID and no ability to get the medical care he needed for his diabetes. He did not know Arabic, much less how to navigate a war-torn society where being Americanized makes you a target. On Aug. 6, Ms. Bolis contacted me again to say that her brother was dead. His family believes he died because he couldn’t obtain the medicine he needed in Iraq.
His funeral is Friday. His physical remains were sent to Michigan, the only way he could come back home. Jimmy Aldaoud — the living person who loved and was loved by his family — would never have been allowed in America again.
I am part of a team of lawyers who began trying to save Mr. Aldaoud’s life over two years ago, before we even knew his name. He was one of more than 1,400 Iraqis in this country with deportation orders, most issued years or even decades ago. In June 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement suddenly rounded up hundreds of them for immediate deportation.
My organization, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, working with lawyers around the country, went to court, warning that deporting these people to Iraq would result in persecution, torture and death. A federal judge ruled that an immigration judge had to decide whether they would be safe in Iraq before deportations could be carried out. That order saved hundreds of lives.
But ICE appealed, no matter the human cost, intent on deporting people like Mr. Aldaoud who have lived their whole lives here. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling, giving ICE the green light to resume deportations in April. And ICE did, even though Iraq is so dangerous that the State Department recently evacuated all nonessential personnel. Mr. Aldaoud was one of the first to be deported once ICE had that green light. Predictably, inevitably, he died.
Mr. Aldaoud is to be buried next to his mother. He would have wanted that, because, as Ms. Bolis says, he was a “big-time mama’s boy.” He was also a fierce defender of his three sisters, especially when their father drank. His dad kicked him out when he was 16, but they continued to fight, and the son ended up with assault convictions. He struggled with mental illness and homelessness, working odd jobs and stealing loose change from cars. Jimmy’s convictions made him deportable, because he was a lawful permanent resident, not a U.S. citizen like his younger sisters who were born here.
Yet Mr. Aldaoud didn’t harden. He stayed close to his family, never leaving the streets of Metro Detroit. And when his mother had a stroke that paralyzed her left side, Mr. Aldaoud returned home to care for her, changing her diapers and giving her insulin, until she died on her birthday in 2015.
Before Mr. Aldaoud was deported, he sat for a year and half in ICE detention, desperately missing his family, especially his 3-year-old niece, Ella, Ms. Bolis’ daughter. Mr. Aldaoud kept Ella’s photo under his pillow in his cell, and told her mother, “I just sit and look at Ella and pray to God that I can see her only for five minutes.”
After Mr. Aldaoud was deported, he never got to see Ella or his family again, except on desperate FaceTime calls — an effort to etch his loved ones into his thoughts so he could try to sleep at night on the Baghdad streets. He had lost the family that kept his world intact.
Every day, ICE is trying to deport people like Jimmy Aldaoud to Iraq. And every day, I feel like I am doing a type of death penalty work. My clients face death simply because they were born outside our borders. In fact, I don’t even know whether Mr. Aldaoud was the first to die — we can’t reach many of those who’ve been deported. But we know that if the deportations continue, he will not be the last.
We must protect other Iraqis from Mr. Aldaoud’s fate. ICE must immediately halt Iraqi deportations until there has been a full investigation both of his death and of ICE’s overreach in attempting to deport over a thousand people to a country where they are in grave danger.
And Congress must pass bipartisan legislation, the Deferred Removal for Iraqi Nationals Including Minorities Act, that would pause most Iraqi deportations for two years and give Iraqis a chance to show an immigration judge why their old removal orders are no longer appropriate.
This legislation is essential. I fear, indeed I know, that if it doesn’t pass, if ICE continues the deportations, more people will die. And I don’t want to foresee another death.
Miriam Aukerman is a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.
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