Deporting Our Souls

We are constantly reminded of the harshness of the 1996 laws that eliminated or limited many important forms of relief to deserving LPRs facing deportation. See “Deporting Our Souls–Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy” (Temple Univ. Press 2006). Lance Williams writes in the San Francisco Chronicle of one particular case:

He came to California from Afghanistan at age 12, a refugee of the Soviet-Afghan war and, he says, a victim of torture.

His family settled in Fremont, where he went to school, got a job, became thoroughly Americanized – and made one bad mistake. In 1997, when he was 22, he had sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend and served eight months in county jail.

But by 2003, he had put his life back together and opened up his own body shop. Believing his past was behind him, he applied for U.S. citizenship. He’s been in a federal prison in Arizona ever since.

For more than four years, Obaidullah “Chito” Rahimi, 33, has languished behind bars, ordered deported because of that old conviction. He faces an agonizing choice:

Should he remain in an American prison and fight his case in court, in hopes that someday a judge will let him go home to his family and friends?

Or, to escape jail, should he agree to be deported to Afghanistan, a country where he doesn’t know a soul, where he cannot read the language, and where he fears he will be targeted for kidnapping or murder because he’s an American?

According to immigration experts, Rahimi’s dilemma is an extreme example of the choice confronting more than 90,000 immigrants who face removal from the United States each year because they have been implicated in crimes. Click here for the rest of the story.

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