Chaldean Catholics and Iraqi Kurds face deportation

By VvB | LAKESIDE, MICHIGAN

AT MIDNIGHT on July 24th a two-week stay of deportation for more than 1,400 Iraqis—around 300 Christians and dozens of Kurds among them—will expire. Mark Goldsmith, a district judge in Michigan, had prolonged the stay twice to allow time to consider a class-action suit representing 114 of them who argue they face persecution and torture, or worse, on their return. Civil-rights advocates are doing what they can to prevent the deportations. Family and friends have protested against them almost daily.

One of the Iraqis in danger of imminent deportation is Usama Jamil Hamama, known as Sam, a 54-year old Iraqi Christian who came to America lawfully as a refugee in 1974 when he was four. Mr Hamama, who lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where he is a partner at a local supermarket, is married and has four children, all American citizens, between the ages of 11 and 17. He is a regular churchgoer and a pillar of his community. On June 11th, just as he was getting ready to go to church with his family, Mr Hamama was arrested by several agents of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and brought to a detention centre in Youngstown, Ohio.

Mr Hamama is one of scores of Iraqi Christians in the Detroit area and Iraqi Kurds in and around Nashville, Tennessee, who were plucked from their homes by ICE agents as President Donald Trump put into action his promise to deport those he calls criminal aliens. Mr Hamama is a member of the Chaldean community, who descend from the ancient Assyrians, speak Aramaic and practise Catholicism according to eastern rites. Most Chaldeans in America live in and around Detroit.

The Chaldeans were staunch supporters of Mr Trump during his campaign for the presidency. This meant they felt safe after his election; during the campaign Mr Trump frequently spoke out in favour of protecting Christians in the Middle East. In January he tweeted: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”

All the potential deportees, including Mr Hamama, have a criminal record. Their crimes range from relatively minor ones such as overstaying a visa or selling pot to second-degree murder. Twenty-eight years ago, Mr Hamama was convicted for assault, possession of a firearm and carrying a pistol in a car, for which he served a two-year prison sentence. Since then his record has been spotless, but his criminal conviction means that he has been subject of an order of removal to Iraq since 1994. He was able to remain in America until now because the Iraqis refused to let deportees from America into their country.

This changed in March when Mr Trump removed Iraqis from the list of countries of his temporary travel ban from Muslim countries. As part of the deal, Baghdad consented to issue travel documents to deportees from America. But the Iraqis fear, with good reason, that many of them will face persecution, torture and even death if they return to their home country. Earlier this year Congress passed a resolution designating Chaldean and Assyrian Christians the victims of attempted genocide by Islamic State (IS). Though recently in retreat, IS still rules in parts of Iraq.

In late June the Evangelical Immigration Table, an association of evangelical Christians many of whom are strong supporters of Mr Trump, wrote to John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, asking him to reconsider the decision to deport the Iraqi Christians. “The horrors facing Christians in Iraq are well documented,” they wrote. And they reminded Mr Kelly that Mike Pence, the vice-president, recently noted in his remarks at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians that in Iraq “we’ve actually seen monasteries demolished, priests and monks beheaded, and the two-millennia-old Christian tradition in Mosul virtually extinguished overnight”.

The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded Judge Goldsmith at the end of June to halt the deportations. In his ruling the judge said sending the Iraqis back now would expose them to a “substantiated risk of death, torture, or other grave persecution before their legal claims can be tested in a court”. At the time this article was published Judge Goldsmith had not renewed the stay of the deportations for a third time.