When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, Khalid’s family fled their home and left everything behind. Family members scattered to various countries seeking safety. One sister eventually went back to Kuwait after several years only to find the family’s home destroyed by heavy Iraqi artillery.
As a result of the war his father had lost his job and could no longer finance Khalid’s education. Consequently, Khalid was left without a homeland to return to and the grim prospect of dropping out of college to fend for himself as best he could. His father, fearing for his son’s safety, encouraged Khalid to stay in the United States, at least until there was a stable home to return to. That time never came.
In 1991 he moved from Oklahoma to Utica, New York. While in Utica, he obtained employment as a taxi driver. However, Khalid soon realized that working as a taxi driver in Utica in the early 1990’s was a hazardous profession. Many taxi drivers were assaulted and robbed and there was at least one documented fatality.
At 12:30 on a summer night in 1993, while filling out some paperwork in his cab, he was threatened by four individuals: individuals that Khalid felt meant him physical harm.
In order to defend himself he shot a gun into the air. Unfortunately, Khalid was only familiar with Oklahoma’s permissive gun laws and was not aware that New York state required guns to be registered. Regardless, his intention was never to hurt anyone; he merely wanted to scare them away. Indeed, no one was hurt, nor was any property damaged. The police report confirms that he was approached and harassed by a group of people-- two of whom had previous convictions. Ultimately, this information was disregarded but significance was attached to the firing of an unregistered gun.
He fully cooperated with the police but despite this he was arrested and taken into custody. When the District Attorney agreed to lower the charges to 3rd degree reckless endangerment, a minor infraction that did not result in jail time, but the presiding judge refused to take the plea. Thankfully, the gun violation was dropped but my husband was charged with 1st degree reckless endangerment. He served 4 months of his 6 month sentence due to good behavior.
After his release, Khalid was looking forward to putting the conviction behind him. Unfortunately, fate had other plans. After 9/11, fear seeped into the dark crevices in American’s psyches and secured its predatory talons into our quaking flesh. Consequently, many Americans concluded if a few extremists can be callous enough to take innocent lives, than by extension, all Muslims must be dangerous. Unfortunately, this is an assumption based on fear and ignorance and has been exploited by American leaders to expand their own Imperialistic agenda, and is not based on empirical fact.
In retribution, the United States government began a systematic and intense operative in removing Muslim and Arab immigrants from this country. Although many were in the United States illegally, the assault was also felt by legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens with Muslim and Arab backgrounds.
In 2001, my husband was unmarried, Muslim and had residential ties to Kuwait: one of the flagged countries suspected of housing terrorists. As a result of these factors and his electronic expertise, Khalid fit the profile the U.S. government implemented for identifying suspected terrorists.
After 2001, Khalid became immersed in a legal immigration nightmare. The judge presiding over Khalid’s original immigration case determined that he was deportable based on his one conviction of reckless endangerment. If reckless endangerment was considered an aggravated felony than the judge would have been correct. However, reckless endangerment is considered a crime of moral turpitude. In order for a crime of moral turpitude to be considered a deportable crime, the individual in question would have to commit one crime of moral turpitude within five years of arriving in the States or-- failing to qualify in that regards-- would need to commit two crimes of moral turpitude. My husband’s situation did not qualify as deportable based on these criteria.
Consequently, my husband remanded this decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The BIA agreed that the one crime of moral turpitude is not deportable. Additionally, they determined that he was eligible for asylum, a form of relief the immigration judge denied him-- unless his crime was considered a particularly serious crime. Subsequently, the immigration judge proclaimed that Khalid’s crime was a particularly serious crime and therefore, he was denied asylum and considered deportable.
Once again, Khalid appealed the decision to the BIA. They agreed it was a particularly serious crime, which denied him asylum, but did not concur deportability based on the conviction. Despite the BIA’s reluctance in issuing a deportation mandate, my husband was apprehended at his home in 2003 and deposited in a detention facility in Batavia New York. He languished in detention for over eight months, despite having legal papers, a valid passport and repeatedly imploring the detention officers to return him to India. During this unconstitutional imprisonment, Khalid lost his livelihood, his freedom and his house.
To digress to legal explanations, the usage of the term “particularly serious crime” is predominately an ambiguous designation. An unfortunate consequence of the 2nd circuit decision in my husband’s case is the ability of immigration judges to apply this designation to any conviction, even without evidence of violence, criminal intent or premeditation. Although this law could be applied to any immigrant, it was most often utilized against Muslims and Arabs.
Indeed, this tendency to single out this particular ethnic population continued in the passing of other security measures including the absconder apprehension initiative, and the Muslim immigrant registration process. The Migration Policy Institute conducted a survey of Muslims detained after 9/11 entitled: America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity after September 11th. They found the overall deportations of Muslims increased substantially in the years following the tragedy of 9/11.
Fears of deportations and the implementation of ethnic specific laws effectively alienated most Muslims from their communities and severely restricted their lives. The report explains in the following excerpt:
“As a general immigration enforcement measure, the absconder apprehension initiative is legitimate and important. However, after September 11 the government changed the character of the program to make it nationality-specific. This has marginal security benefits, while further equating national origin with dangerousness, although stepped-up absconder apprehension efforts are eventually to encompass all nationalities, this has not happened so far.”
There is no indication that any of the men who were deterred at detention centers were actually a menace to American society. The majority of detainees were non-violent, had family ties in the States and had been residents for a considerable amount of time. They do not fit the established profile of a real terrorist. As the report discusses:
“Most importantly, from our research it appears that the government’s major successes in apprehending terrorists have not come from post-September 11 detentions but from other efforts such as international intelligence initiatives, law enforcement cooperation, and information provided by arrests made abroad. A few noncitizens detained after September 11 have been characterized as terrorists, but the charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or unrelated crimes.”
The actual result of these measures has not resulted in a safer country. Instead, we have created a society that is alienated, fragmented and unnecessarily fearful and distrustful of each other. Rather than safety, these legal statutes have resulted in instability and the eradication of numerous personal liberties. The Migration Policy Institute explains:
“The government’s use of immigration law as a primary means of fighting terrorism has substantially diminished civil liberties and stigmatized Arab- and Muslim-American communities in this country. These measures, which were primarily targeted at Muslims, have diminished the openness of U.S. society and eroded national unity.”
The problem with this stigmatization is that people operate under the illusion that it is easy to identify the enemy. The underlying assumption remains: If Muslims are inherently evil and are easy to identify, with their conspicuous facial hair and strange clothing; it will be easy to banish them from our country. Only then will we be safe. This sounds eerily familiar. In times of crises, many civilizations have implemented similar magical and dangerous thinking.
One does not need to go far back into America’s history to find such an example. Consider, for instance, the practice of sending thousands of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Now, after years of reflection, most Americans would agree this was not the right thing to do. In fact, many Japanese interned were later awarded monetary compensation as a symbol of America’s regret.
We’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that evil dons a readily identifiable mask. Evil doers wear peculiar clothing and speak strange languages. We don’t want to admit that evil is elusive. We want comfort in an uncertain world so we concoct a fictional reality where we can identify “the other” as the cause of our suffering and uncertainty. As long as our attention is exclusively occupied by eradicating this evil then we don’t have to look at the reality before us. Evil dons many masks and unlike humans, it does not discriminate.
Occasionally, particularly in the beginning of a relationship, your partner will do or say something that goes against convention. It happens in every relationship, but I surmise it happens most often in relationships that comprise one person from a different culture. When one keeps an open mind it is amazing what can be learned within these intersections of diverging perspectives. 
