Thread: 42-year resident of San Jose faces deportation to Israel des

42-year resident of San Jose faces deportation to Israel despite mental illness
By Ken McLaughlin


Mercury News

Posted: 07/04/2009 06:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 07/04/2009 09:45:29 PM PDT


When he was 10, Hank Nijmeh moved with his family to San Jose when the Beatles were still together and much of the Santa Clara Valley was carpeted with mustard fields. He was one of five children in a friendly Palestinian Catholic family that established one of the valley's most beloved eateries — the Falafel's Drive-In on Stevens Creek Boulevard.

Today the 52-year-old Nijmeh spends much of his day in a cell at the Yuba County jail, where he often hears terrifying voices and is tormented by severe hallucinations. Diagnosed with a "chronic psychotic paranoid disorder," he is about to be deported and put on a plane to his native Israel, which his family left nearly 43 years ago.

During his three years of incarceration, his family says, Nijmeh's mental disorder has become more severe because of a lack of proper medication and the constant noise from fellow inmates, who he says steal his things, taunt him and pick fights.

"They've broken me down and something is going wrong in my brain," Nijmeh said in a telephone interview. "I need psychological help."

For 11 years, his family has spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting his deportation — a battle that stems from two old marijuana convictions. He's no angel, his attorneys say, but he certainly doesn't deserve the hell he and his family have been put through.

Angela Bean, whose Oakland law firm has represented Nijmeh for the past seven years, said his pending deportation illustrates some of the faults of a sweeping 1996 immigration law aimed at cracking down not only on illegal immigrants but also on legal immigrants who have committed crimes. The law, she said, prevents judges from granting one-time pardons to longtime permanent residents for humanitarian reasons.

"It hurts me to think he's going to be thrown out of the country like a piece of trash and might well die in Israel because he has nowhere to go and no one to take care of him," Bean said. "He is being punished for being sick."

His family says Nijmeh has no relatives left in Israel and that he speaks no Hebrew and understands little Arabic. Here, his siblings say, he has a loving family that will shop and cook for him.

Held since 2006

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has kept Nijmeh in custody since April 2006, when he tested positive for marijuana while on probation.

Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman, said Nijmeh has a lengthy criminal history dating back more than two decades, "including convictions for crimes of violence."

Over the years, Nijmeh has been on the losing end of a byzantine series of motions, orders and appeals aimed at freeing him. He has been denied bail and was not allowed to attend his father's funeral in 2007.

His lawyers are appealing his deportation order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the court in late April denied a stay that would allow him to stay in the country during the appeal. That means that ICE can deport him as soon as the government receives the necessary travel documents from Israel.

His lawyers and family say his jailers have never taken proper care of Nijmeh. Only recently, they say, did he begin receiving some of the anti-psychotic medications that he needs to stabilize his mood and fend off a torrent of hallucinations and delusions.

But Kice disputed those claims, saying that "Mr. Nijmeh has received extensive medical and psychiatric care while in ICE custody." In the past eight months, she said, he's been seen by health care professionals, on average, every other week.

None of this would be happening to Nijmeh if U.S. immigration law in the 1970s was the same as it is today.

The children of immigrants automatically become citizens when their parents naturalize. But they have to be under 18.

Nijmeh's mother, Zahie, became a citizen in 1973 when he was 16; his father, Anton, became a citizen two years later. So three of Hank Nijmeh's siblings automatically became citizens in 1975. The other, born in the U.S., was already a citizen. But because Nijmeh had turned 18 when his father naturalized, he was out of luck.

The law, however, now requires that only one parent become a citizen for the children to become citizens. But the law passed by Congress in 2000 was not retroactive.

His family says Nijmeh has struggled with marijuana abuse for much of his life — one of the reasons he never applied for citizenship.

Nijmeh's troubles stem from a 1982 conviction for cultivating eight marijuana plants and a 1993 conviction for possessing 20 marijuana seedlings for sale — a charge his family disputes. "It was all strictly for personal use," said one of his sisters, Deanna Grayeb of San Jose.

But ICE officials say Nijmeh did himself no favors by continuing to get into scrapes with the law during the past decade — from making an obscene threat, to violating a restraining order to striking his girlfriend during an altercation. His family and his attorneys, however, say his well-documented mental illness was at the root of all the incidents.

Promising future

When the former Boy Scout graduated from San Jose's Del Mar High School in the mid-'70s, life had seemed so promising.

"He and my dad managed the drive-in," Grayeb said. "He was a good, hard worker and part of the team."

Eventually, though, he wasn't able to work because of his mental illness and he increasingly self-medicated himself with pot, she said, "and then everything escalated.''

Despite his problems, his siblings and mother say, he has the total support of his family. "He needs to be treated in a hospital," Grayeb said. "We need to bring him home."

During a 2006 hearing in San Francisco before immigration Judge Anthony Murry, Russell Wilkie, a Campbell psychotherapist who had treated Nijmeh for three years, testified that his patient was tormented by hallucinations of faces, electronic magnetic jets and the moon — which he insisted were all following him as part of the U.S. government's effort to deport him.

Kice, however, noted that "deportable aliens with mental health problems are not exempt from the consequences of immigration law and are subject to removal if they violate those laws.''

His attorneys have argued that if Nijmeh is deported he could be picked up by Israeli security police and possibly end up being tortured.

"What they're going to see is an erratic-looking Palestinian who can't give a clear explanation for what he's doing," said Jesse Lloyd, one of his attorneys.

But Murry didn't buy the argument, calling Israel "a modern democracy" that doesn't torture its citizens.

"We don't torture. We don't hit people," said Akiva Tor, Israel's consul general to the Pacific Northwest, who pointed to a 1999 Israeli Supreme Court decision that outlawed torture.

Asked what would happen to Nijmeh if he were deported, Tor said that he would be cared for by Israel's elaborate social-welfare system. Still, he questioned whether that was the best alternative for someone with serious mental problems.

"If he is an Israeli citizen we won't prevent his returning home. It's his civil right to enter the country," he said. "But in this case his family is here, and it's always best to be taken care of by your family."

Contact Ken McLaughlin at kmclaughlin@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5552.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12744965? ... ck_check=1

Diagnosed with a "chronic psychotic paranoid disorder," he is about to be deported and put on a plane to his native Israel, which his family left nearly 43 years ago.

During his three years of incarceration, his family says, Nijmeh's mental disorder has become more severe because of a lack of proper medication and the constant noise from fellow inmates, who he says steal his things, taunt him and pick fights

They say he's psychotic and paranoid, and they claim his mental illness is why he broke law after law after law, including punching a woman, but did they forget he was paranoid when he told them inmates steal from him, taunt him, and pick fights with him? Did they forget he was paranoid when he claimed doctors were ignoring him and not treating him?
I agree with his brother. They do need to take him home. They need to take him home to Israel. That is his home.

I have compassion for anyone that suffers mental problems, however our country has lofiter problems to deal with right now. The very existence of our country as a "free nation" it at risk. Either people help us or hurt us and if they hurt us they need to go........all illegals hurt us.

"He is being punished for being sick."
No....he is being deported because that is the law....you break the law ...you leave....

He's been in jail 11 years because of his family.

Truthfully, I believe they knew he was ill when they brought him here bacause he would have been shunned in Isreal. He's been a menace to the US, ever since and they did not put him in a mental health facility. They let him run loose and terrorize us, while they secured their citizenship.

Dixie