Thread: Their uncertain lives

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Their uncertain lives

BY ROBERT POLNER
STAFF WRITER

August 2, 2005

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, federal officials have stepped up their domestic investigation and security efforts in the hopes of preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The increased scrutiny has resulted in a 55 percent jump in deportation from New York City in one year alone. A two-day Newsday series looks at the impact of the federal efforts on immigrant New Yorkers from Muslim, Arab and South Asian countries in particular.

Glimpsed through the eyes of deportation officers or the plume of government scrutiny since 9/11, Enayet Ullah would have seemed like a stranger to his family.

To them, he was anything but a shadowy figure. He was more like an average joe.

They described him as a loyal husband and doting father who worked at Kennedy Airport as a curbside baggage handler and prayed toward Mecca like clockwork.

A slender Bangladeshi, with basset-hound eyes, Ullah struck those who knew him as almost painfully polite.

In the U.S. immigration service's computer files, however, Ullah, was a wanted man.

In the ominous phrase widely applied since 9/11, he was potentially a "person of interest," having failed to heed a judge's deportation order after staying in this country longer than his visa allowed.

Ullah was picked up in Operation Tarmac, one in a surfeit of law-enforcement initiatives portrayed by immigration officials as a hedge against attacks like the ones recently in the London transport system.

Ullah's November 2002 arrest was the beginning of a post-9/11 chapter that, he said, has been personally devastating and still threatens to send him and some - or all - of his family back to the poor, politically volatile country they fled 11 years ago.

The irony of his case is this: Even as the government tries to deport him, he has been permitted to return to his job at Kennedy, in a location and an occupation the government describe as sensitive.

To critics of the nation's beefed-up enforcement efforts, Ullah's story is a reflection of how some immigrants and their loved ones have gotten caught in the stoked-up federal zeal for capturing or deterring terrorists.



A policy that 'spread fear'

Julie Dinnerstein, a Manhattan-based attorney and advocate for immigrants, contends that the ramifications have been "ruinous" for thousands of Muslim families "who had nothing do with 9/11," many of them New Yorkers.

"It has spread fear through entire ethnic groups," she said.

The aggressive use of immigration laws, which authorities say has become a significant enforcement tool, has helped the authorities capture more lawbreakers, from people with outdated visas to sex predators.

But it has settled somewhat incongruously across New York City, a metropolis largely shaped by its history as an immigrant gateway.

After decades of ups and downs in the number of immigrants detained and deported from the United States based on evolving immigration laws and policies, deportations jumped to an all-time peak in 2003, the latest year for which government data are available.

In that year, a record 186,151 people were removed from the United States - along with their kin - despite legal appeals.

The total represented a 24 percent increase in deportations compared to the previous year.

In the metropolitan area, the increase was 55 percent - from 2,877 to 4,468 deportees, plus their family members.

Advocates for immigrants contend the increases are the result of a clamp-down climate that has weighed most heavily upon new arrivals from Mideast and South Asian countries, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The tougher tone, according to many, was struck emphatically by the government's Special Registration Program of 2002 and 2003, which required male noncitizens aged 16 and older from two dozen predominantly Muslim countries to contact the federal immigration service so that officials could better keep track of them.

Thousands not authorized to remain in the country have been placed in deportation proceedings as a result, and many of those cases are still pending.

Additionally, there has unfolded a series of high-profile operations with names like Tarmac, Predator and Absconder, although they have accounted for only a small fraction of immigrant arrests and deportation proceedings.

"Let me be clear," then-Attorney General John Ashcroft declared at a Washington news conference on the arrests of hundreds of illegal immigrant employees like Ullah in the airline industry. "There will be zero tolerance of security breaches at our nation's airports."

Ullah contends his own uncertain situation is due to confusing and bad guidance he says he got from a lawyer early on in his immigration legal odyssey.



Persecution to prosecution

He insists that he and his family cannot safely return to their homeland.

"In Bangladesh, I was jailed and beaten for being the member of the wrong political party," Ullah, 55, said over a cup of jasmine tea in his Brooklyn apartment.

"But at that time, I was in my 40s," he went on, "and a stronger man. The deportation case is harder for me, for everyone who knows me, since we can't know what will happen to us."

"Only Allah, our God, knows what will happen," adds his wife, Razia Sultana, 44.

Ullah, his wife and their three children could yet be forced to return to their homeland if Ullah's court-reinstated bid for U.S. political asylum, to be heard in September, is turned down, he said.

Legal experts, including his newest attorney, noted that an average of one in five such appeals is successful in New York.

Immigration authorities defended their firm stance toward immigrants who hold lapsed visas or have committed more serious infractions, adding that one's national origins were irrelevant.

"Our responsibility," said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, "is to restore and ensure the integrity of the nation's immigration system, and that means ensuring that those individuals with outstanding orders of deportation are actually deported."

Ullah's decision to leave Bangladesh was rooted, he said, in his role as publicity secretary for the working-class-oriented Jatiya Party, a rival to the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

He said he was tortured with jailhouse beatings during nearly three weeks behind bars in late 1993 because of his political position.

Promptly after his abrupt release, he sold his profitable import-export company and bade tearful good-byes to family and friends, while his wife gave up her prestigious post as a college psychology lecturer along with face-to-face contact with her parents and other relatives, he said.



Seeking asylum in America

It was a frigid day in 1994 when the family arrived at Kennedy Airport, Ullah recalled.

His daughter, Rahnuma Afrin, was then 13. Her younger sister, Tarnima, was 6.

The couple's third child, a son, Tasfiq, would be born a U.S. citizen in 1997.

After finding an $800-a-month apartment in Borough Park, Ullah said he began working at a clothing store nearby, and applied for his airport position several months later.

Ullah said he also applied for political asylum, which he viewed as his best hope to obtain citizenship.

But during an early hearing in immigration court in downtown Manhattan, Ullah's attorney at the time inexplicably advised him to tell the judge that he and his family would return to Bangladesh voluntarily within four months, according to Sin Yen Ling, his third and current lawyer, who took his case after he was detained at the airport.

Ullah said he followed a former attorney's advice because his knowledge of the law was scant, assuming that whatever he was told to say was designed to help him win his asylum case.

That was not a good move on his part.

"I don't think, quite frankly, that Mr. Ullah understood what it meant or what he had done," Ling said.

Ullah did come to understand soon afterward, and said he hired his second attorney to write to the immigration service to try to amend his court statement.

As he waited for a response, Ullah said he returned to focusing on his work and family responsibilities, tucked away in a diaspora of Bangladeshi New Yorkers, a group that has grown at the fastest rate of any immigrant community in the city.

They numbered 42,855 by the latest U.S. Census Bureau count in 2000.





Arrested at his workplace

On the morning of Nov. 19, 2002, Ullah said he was resting on the couch to recover from the usual strains of the workweek.

Sultana was cooking spiced and curried legumes with lemon-accented rice for guests who were due to arrive at dusk to break the family's 24-hour Muslim fast.

The younger two children raced from room to room. The cell phone chimed - his supervisor was unexpectedly calling him in to work.

As soon as he arrived at Kennedy Airport, he was met by three FBI and immigration agents holding out his work ID photo, he said.

Ullah was taken for prisoner processing in lower Manhattan and then to an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. His eldest daughter - petite and shy - was the first to visit a few days later.

"He was not the same," said the Hunter College student, remembering her first trip to the jail. "I never saw my dad cry. That day he actually cried - to me!

"'Please,' he pleaded, 'Find a way to get me out of here, or I will go mad.'"

With a new receptionist job lined up to help her family replace her father's salary, and her mother working a second job in addition to her long-standing clerical position, Afrin said she found it difficult to find time for college.

She missed her midterms, then dropped her demanding computer-science major, and pared her schedule down to one class, biology.

As for her Yankees-fan brother, Tasfiq, now 8, he was never told that his father was in a New Jersey jail.

Still, in Ullah's absence, he began to perform unsatisfactorily at school, as described with sudden concern by teachers in telephone messages left for his mother.



Reprieve from deportation

Luckily for Ullah, on Jan. 2, 2003, he was released from detention when Ling convinced a judge to grant a temporary reprieve from the court order of deportation.

More significantly, the judge allowed Ullah to reopen his previously rejected appeal for political asylum.

The family paid bail set at $15,000 with money sent by a well-off relative in Canada.

"He was lucky to get that," Ling said of the reinstituted asylum bid, "and I would say it's his last, best hope."

Ullah had spent his first nine months of freedom at his Brooklyn home, looking for work in the classifieds and looking after his two younger children.

During this period of time, his mother-in-law suffered a heart attack in Bangladesh; his wife could not travel to see her because of their immigration issues.

With the work authorization papers that the government provided him, Ullah was eventually hired back by his former employer, Aviation Safeguards Inc., the same airline contractor that had employed him at $8 an hour plus tips and overtime starting in 1997.

"They welcomed me back," Ullah said of his employer. "I am grateful, yes."

No matter what happens next, after Ullah's scheduled hearing in September, his son will have the legal right to grow up in this country, having been born here. Because of his age, however, staying behind without his parents would be virtually impossible.

Ullah's eldest daughter, too, might be able to stay in New York, as she was married more than a year ago to a Bangladeshi-born U.S. citizen.

But while Afrin's husband is applying for a green card for her, her father's predicament may complicate her chances of obtaining one.

"At this point, we're all New Yorkers, with real ties here," Afrin, now 24, said of her beleaguered family.

"This is home."

Deportations on the rise

A total of 1,046,422 immigrants were placed in deportation proceedings nationwide in 2003, roughly the same as the year before. At the same time, 186,151 were subjected to forced removals - or deportations - despite legal objections, a 24 percent rise from the previous year. In the New York metropolitan area, the increase was from 2,877 to 4,468 deportees.

Those deported in recent years from the United States to certain Asian and Middle Eastern countries:

Country '03 '02 '01

Afghanistan 68 12 10

Bangladesh 88 91 70

Iraq 19 7 6

Lebanon 130 119 50

Pakistan 728 812 346

Saudi Arabia 42 35 16

Syria 53 56 29

U.S. deportations in recent years:

2003 186,151

2002 150,084

2001 177,739

2000 185,987

1999 180,902

1998 173,146

1997 114,432

1996 69,680

1995 50,924

1994 45,674

SOURCE: U.S. CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES

METRO-AREA DEPORTATIONS

2002 - 2,877

2003 - 4,468

INCREASE 55%

According to US Border Patrol, there are between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 illegal aliens who enter every year.

Do the math. If less than 200,000 a year are deported, then watch your population explode, your jobs disappear, your labor market flood, your housing costs rise, your wildlife habitats disappear, your ozone levels rise, your energy and fuel costs rise, while your drinking water vanishes!!

It's not complicated....the road to a Third World Toilet Bowl....it's a pyramid scheme by the numbers...population numbers.

Why do think the Pyramid is on US Currency?

Technically, Pyramid Schemes are Illegal in the United States.

Close the borders, deport illegals that enter every year illegally, and prosecute those who aided in their being here to begin with.

Veeeery Simple.