http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaind...890.xml&coll=2

Thursday, December 01, 2005
Rachel Dissell
Plain Dealer Reporter

Jamil Zayed has avoided deportation from the United States before.

He wasn't deported after he was twice found guilty in the 1990s of food stamp fraud. Or after he twice pleaded guilty to abusing his wife.

Authorities could not even remove Zayed from the country after he spent time in prison for telling his wife he would kill her if she didn't drop charges against him for pulling her hair, punching her in the head and throwing her to the floor.

An immigration judge agreed he should be deported and Zayed's appeal of the deportation order was denied, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

But they had one problem: No other country would take Zayed.

Since he is Palestinian, immigration officials could not obtain the right documents that would allow Zayed to enter another country where Palestinians reside if he leaves this one.

So, Zayed was released.

He went on to help run a convenience store on Hayden Avenue in East Cleveland until he was arrested again last summer.

This time, Zayed, 48, of Parma, was accused of waving a gun and then raping a store clerk during her first day on the job. The woman told police Zayed had pointed the gun at a man who had shoplifted a can of beer earlier in the day.

Zayed this week pleaded guilty to rape and having a gun he wasn't supposed to be carrying. Judge Timothy McGinty sentenced him to five years in prison.

Immigration officials hope they can deport Zayed this time because they have five years to persuade someone to take him. But there is no guarantee.

"We can reach out to countries in that region and see if they'll take him," said immigration agent Rob Baker, adding that some countries in the Middle East are willing to cooperate.

Baker said the political makeup of the region might change in the next few years.

If not, Zayed will be free again. The Supreme Court has said that the United States can hold people like Zayed in jail for only so long after his sentence expires.

Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Detective Jamie Bonnette, one of the deputies who investigated the rape case, said Zayed has gotten a free pass to keep committing crimes.

"If it were me, I'd put him on a plane and give him a parachute," Bonnette said.

Immigration officials admit that Zayed's case is not isolated, though they said they would not release statistics on how many people like Zayed - or others from Cuba, Vietnam, Laos or other countries the United States cannot deport to - are let go every year. The United States either doesn't recognize or doesn't have diplomatic relations with about 10 countries.

"There are people throughout the United States who have this situation," said Greg Palmore, an immigration spokesman based in Detroit.

Palmore said immigration officials don't like letting people like Zayed go, "but we can't circumvent it. We have to follow the law."

David Leopold, an immigration law expert and Case Western Reserve University professor, said the government is right about the loophole that allows people like Zayed to stay, but that the laws are important.

"When you're dealing with violent criminal aliens, who wouldn't want them kept in jail" after they've served their sentence? he said. "But there is a price we pay for the Constitution."

Leopold said, however, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might have more success if it spent its time and money on the difficult cases and not the easy cases of poor, often disadvantaged folks.

In 2000, the same year Zayed was set free in the second domestic violence case, a teenager who had been adopted by a Medina County couple as a child from Brazil was deported after being convicted of possessing less than 8 ounces of marijuana. He later was killed there. And a Lakewood mother of three children who was in the country illegally was recently deported to Venezuela, despite protests that she had no family there and didn't speak the language. She left her children behind.

Leopold said he could name dozens of cases where people who committed petty crimes were deported, even though their circumstances were heartbreaking.

"I think ICE should take a look at each case individually," Leopold said.

"The government has the discretion to put a case on the backburner and spend their efforts going after the real criminal if they wanted to."