by Urooj Alavi

I work as a registered nurse in an intensive care unit in Southern California. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I’ve been working alongside my colleagues as we try to save the lives of the sickest patients and comfort their families. The hours have been long, and we have all seen more than our share of sorrow.
 
Fortunately, for most of the pandemic I had my husband to lean on. It was comforting to know that while I was in the unit, he was at home caring for our two young children and that when I came home he would be there to support me.
 
That changed in July, when ICE detained him during a routine check-in. Now they are saying that he will be deported to Pakistan as soon as they are able to put him on a flight. I need your help to try and stop that from happening.
 
Amir and I were introduced to each other by a mutual friend in New York. I loved listening to him talk. He was so knowledgeable and interesting. In Pakistan he had been a doctor, later coming to the United States on a student visa to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas in environmental science. While he was there, he started dating a woman who eventually became his first wife.
 
Then 9/11 happened. As a Pakistani Muslim, Amir suddenly became a target of the FBI due to his research into bioluminescent bacteria, and agents showed up at his door, interrogated him, and took him away. It took them a few weeks to realize their suspicions were baseless and though they never acknowledged it, based on discriminatory profiling. Unfortunately, in the months prior to this incident, he and his wife had become estranged. As a result, he was then transferred from FBI custody to ICE, where an officer told him that the collapse of his marriage had made him deportable.
 
For three years, Amir fought to stay in the U.S. from the inside of a detention facility. He taught himself immigration law, filing over 200 cases on behalf of other immigrants while also dealing with his own case. Eventually, he was released after a custody review.
 
But Amir’s troubles with ICE didn’t end there. Every time they could, they detained him again, hoping that they would be able to get documents from Pakistan that would allow them to send him back.
 
Despite this ordeal, Amir and I fell in love, moved to California, and started our family. He told me about the problems he’d had with ICE, but I didn’t care — I believed we would find a way to work it out.
 
Now we have two children, one of whom is a year and a half old and another who is six. Every summer, Amir has dutifully checked in with ICE, who have been issuing him temporary work permits and allowing him to remain in the country with us. He started a business, and has been a taxpayer and member of the community here.
 
I wanted Amir to apply for a marriage visa for us, but he feared that it would anger ICE and lead to his deportation. His time in detention psychologically scarred him and left him afraid of what might happen if he rocked the boat.
 
This past July, when Amir went to his check-in with ICE, they didn’t let him leave. Without warning, they detained him, saying that they had obtained documents from Pakistan that would allow him to be deported, and that they would be doing so as soon as they could.

Credit: Wey Wang for the ACLU

The months since Amir’s detention have been devastating for me and my family. I cannot stop working — my colleagues need me, and now that my husband’s income is gone, I am the sole breadwinner. When I am working, my children are in the care of a babysitter, but if anything were to happen to me they would have nowhere to go. Already, two other nurses at my ICU have become sick with COVID-19.
 
To make matters worse, last week I received horrible news. Amir had been complaining of the lack of precautions in the Adelanto Detention Center, a privately run facility that has a contract with ICE to hold immigrants. He told me that there was no social distancing and that they were often packed into holding cells without regard for anyone’s safety.
 
Now, he has contracted COVID-19.
 
Hearing of his treatment since he became sick has been horrifying. Despite his positive diagnosis at Adelanto, ICE seems to have covered up the test results before transferring him to another facility in Arizona, where he once again tested positive. Now his condition has worsened. The last time we spoke, he told me that his fever had reached 104 degrees.
 
As a medical professional who deals with COVID-19 every day, I am shocked and appalled at ICE’s irresponsible conduct regarding the highly contagious virus. As a wife, I am terrified for my husband, who is a cancer survivor. Amir is a doting father and a gentle man. He deserves better than this. 
 
Once Amir recovers and tests negative for COVID-19, ICE says that they will chain him in shackles and fly him to Pakistan, a country he has not seen in nearly 20 years. I’m not sure what will become of our family if that happens. They call me an essential worker, but how much can they really care about me if they are willing to treat us like this? Even though we are U.S. citizens, my children and I may be forced to leave my country and my job as a nurse, just to keep our family together.
 
Deporting Amir will not make America stronger, better, or safer. It will separate our family and cause grave suffering for me and our children. It pains me to know that we are not the only family facing this kind of treatment from ICE. I need your help to keep Amir here with us. Time is running short, but it’s not too late yet. Please call the Florence Field Office and ask them not to deport Amir and tear our family apart: (602) 766-7030. 

By Ashoka Mukpo, ACLU Staff Reporter

When Flor got word that she was going to be able to make her way into the U.S. and reunite with her family last May, she was ecstatic. For more than nine months, Flor and her five-year-old daughter had been stuck in Matamoros, Mexico, living inside a two-person tent in a squalid refugee camp near the U.S. border while they waited for an immigration judge to hear their asylum claim.
 
Flor — whose full name is being omitted for her safety — and her daughter were among the roughly 60,000 asylum seekers who’d been trapped in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP).
 
The months she spent in Matamoros were a nightmare. Temperatures oscillated between blazing heat during the day and frigid cold at night. One of those nights, she and her daughter huddled in their tent as the sound of a gun battle between police and a local drug cartel echoed through the streets. Another time, Flor says men cornered her and demanded extortion payments. When she failed to pay, she was violently assaulted.
 
So when Flor heard that she and her daughter were going to be allowed to enter the U.S., the where they could continue the asylum process under the care of relatives in Massachusetts, she felt like she was being given a new lease on life.
 
“I don’t know how to express the happiness I felt,” she said. “Knowing that we would be happy, at ease, and safe…I don’t know if you could understand it.”
 
By May 2020, being allowed to enter the U.S. as an asylum seeker was akin to a miracle. 
 
The Coronavirus pandemic was raging in the U.S., and hearings for cases like hers had been indefinitely postponed, stranding thousands of asylum seekers in cities across Mexico with no idea when immigration courts would start hearing their claims again. In March, the Centers for Disease Control had caved under pressure from the Trump administration and issued a dubious public health order that allowed border officials to eject asylum seekers from the country almost instantaneously. By late Spring, America’s asylum system had essentially ceased to exist.

But in Massachusetts, Flor’s family’s plea for help had reached the ACLU of Massachusetts. They were desperate – the stories she told them about the situation in the camp were increasingly dire, and they feared for her life and that of her young daughter. ACLU attorneys in the state and nationally had already brought litigation against the MPP, and they decided to take her case along with a coalition of other advocates.
 
Flor joined two other women — one of whom also had a five-year-old child — as plaintiffs in the case, which argued that putting them in the MPP was illegal and inhumane. In the following weeks, attorneys for the ACLU in Massachusetts interviewed Flor and the other two women via cell phone. Flor would charge hers ahead of time in a communal charging station at the camp.
 
“It was only after talking to them on the phone for a really long time, sometimes ten hours, that they felt comfortable enough to share some of the things that they had been through,” said Adriana Lafaille, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts.
 
Flor is from Guatemala and is Maya K’iche’ — a member of an Indigenous group from the country’s remote highlands. Throughout Guatemalan history, Maya K’iche’ and other Indigenous groups have been the target of discrimination and violence at the hands of politically dominant Spanish-descended Guatemalans, sometimes called “Ladinos.”
 
In recent years, that violence has surged, with conflicts erupting between Mayan communities and prospectors with their eye on valuable mineral deposits beneath Indigenous land.
 
Flor’s father was a vocal advocate for Indigenous rights, and she says she suffered as a result. After he was attacked and incapacitated, she began working as a maid in a Ladino household at the age of 10. She suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her employers, and, at 19, was violently attacked by a group of men who demanded information about her uncles.
 
By mid-2019, she knew it was time to leave.
 
“I realized that my daughter and I would never be able to escape persecution in Guatemala, and we fled,” she recounted in an affidavit.
 
But by the time the COVID-19 crisis erupted, Flor had been in the Matamoros refugee camp for nearly eight months. Her daughter was losing weight, saying she was too sad to eat, and Flor feared the men who’d assaulted her might return.

In May, Flor received a phone call from her attorneys. A federal judge had ruled in her favor, granting the ACLU’s request for her to be taken out of the MPP. She and her daughter would be joining a small handful of people who’d escaped the policy.

Flor’s attorneys feared she might be sent to an immigration detention facility instead of being released to her family in Massachusetts. But after only a single night in detention, she and the others were released.

For Lafaille, it was a hard-fought win in an era where the courts have often thwarted efforts to block the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies.
 
“We were all just so relieved,” she said. “For our clients, it was an end to this incredibly difficult ordeal and a long period of such hardship and uncertainty.”
 
Flor and her daughter settled into life in Massachusetts. The pandemic was still raging, so mostly they stayed inside, but occasionally she accompanied her aunt to the park or grocery store.
 
“It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I feel a tranquility that I have never experienced in my life. I’m treated nicely by people.”
 
But it quickly became apparent that lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security were not going to accept the loss and move on. Not long after Flor and the others arrived in Massachusetts, Lafaille received notice that the government planned to appeal the decision.

By mid-summer, COVID-19 had arrived in shelters across the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as in the refugee camp where Flor spent nearly a year. Despite the rise in cases in Mexico, DHS refused to relent — the agency pressed on with the appeal, seeking the power to send Flor, her daughter, and the others back to Mexico immediately.
 
Lafaille says that the appeal is a symbol of just how hostile the federal government has become towards asylum seekers under the Trump administration.
 
“Not only has the government claimed that our clients weren’t facing urgent harms in Mexico,” she said. “But after our clients were here in Massachusetts, DHS also asserted that the appeal had to be expedited because it was the government that was being harmed by having to allow these three women and two children — who they never contended were dangerous in any way — to live in safety with their families.”
 
Because of DHS’s appeal, Flor isn’t just facing the daunting task of presenting an asylum claim in immigration court — she’s fighting to prevent her and her daughter from being forced to do so from a tent inside a refugee camp during a pandemic.
 
Flor says she has to find ways to distract herself from the prospect.
 
“I tell myself that I shouldn’t think about that,” she said. “When I do, I try to think about other things instead.”
 
The ACLU of Massachusetts argued against DHS’s appeal in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 6. Even in an era where the federal government is using every avenue it can to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country, she says the appeal stands out.
 
“It just shows a government that is totally devoid of humanity,” said Lafaille. “In the government’s eyes, the MPP is working because it is so devastating to asylum seekers that many simply cannot make it to their hearings, and their claims are deemed abandoned. They want the process to be so hard and dangerous in Mexico that people just give up.”

Until the First Circuit rules on the appeal, Flor and the other new arrivals are stuck in limbo, hoping they’ll be allowed to remain safe and out of harm’s way.

“The thing I wish for the most, what I ask God for, is to not be sent back to Mexico,” she said.

The ACLU of Massachusetts is co-counseling this case with the firm Fish & Richardson. Flor has been represented in her immigration case by the Law Office of Jodi Goodwin in Harlingen, Texas, and is now represented by Greater Boston Legal Services and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. In the First Circuit, the plaintiffs’ position was supported by National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, represented by Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP; former government officials including Janet Napolitano, Roberta Jacobson and James Clapper, represented by WilmerHale; and a coalition of legal service providers and organizations, represented by the Law Office of Joshua M. Daniels.

Election Day is fast approaching, and while we’re doing everything we can to prepare, some questions remain unanswered. 

Dale Ho, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, and University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman join the At the Polls podcast this week to discuss litigation across the country that could impact who gets to vote and how.

Election years are always busy for the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, but this year is even more action-packed due to the pandemic. For many, the safest way to vote is to vote by mail, yet millions of eligible voters nationwide cannot access the ballot due to state restrictions on who is allowed to cast an absentee ballot. Other requirements, such as those mandating witness signatures and ballot notarization, do not allow for CDC-recommended social distancing. 

The ACLU has filed 25 lawsuits in 19 states and Puerto Rico to expand access to vote by mail and to challenge unnecessary witness, notary, and voter ID requirements. In the latest episode of At the Polls, we take a closer look at how litigation after the election could end up in the Supreme Court, and what we can all do now to avoid that scenario. 

Listen now and subscribe to stay up to date on election news. 

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