Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Noor Kesbeh
In the year after the 2002 pre-dawn raid that ended their American idyll, the Kesbeh family tried everything imaginable to remain in the United States. They enlisted the media, briefly becoming a cause célèbre in Houston, where protesters held vigils on their lawns and local churches offered to shelter them from the immigration authorities. Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a bill in the House that would have granted them legal residency. Republican Rep. Daryl Issa, an Arab-American from California, spoke out on their behalf, and Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy reportedly intervened with immigration to delay their deportation.
In post-9/11 America, though, it proved impossible for a family of illegal Arab immigrants to garner enough political support to stay. So on March 28, 2003, they were put on a plane bound first for Amsterdam, Netherlands, and then for Amman. Noor and her father swear that the immigration agents, after battling the Kesbehs for so long, high-fived each other as they sent them off.
Only one remained behind -- the oldest son, Alaa, still a teenager. At 1 a.m. the night before their flight, he fled to a friend's house, hoping he could go to another state and disappear. By the end of the year, he'd be a convict versed in the relative iniquities of the U.S. justice system.
The mass deportations that have marooned so many in unfamiliar homelands happened in several overlapping stages. The first occurred immediately after Sept. 11, when hundreds of Arab and Muslim men were rounded up by the FBI, interrogated, imprisoned, often for months without charges, and then put on planes back to their own countries.
Khaled Abu-Shabayek, Hanan and Haneen's 40-year-old father, was caught up in the tail end of these sweeps. On April 18, 2002, Abu-Shabayek, an electrician, stopped by a Walgreens on his way back home to North Carolina from a job in Tennessee. As he pulled into the parking lot, 20 or 30 policemen surrounded him. They arrested him and took him to a Tennessee jail, where he was interrogated by the FBI, something that would happen seven or eight times as he was moved from prison to prison for the next four months and 25 days.
"They ask me about bin Laden, if I know him," Abu-Shabayek recalls, peering behind thick glasses in his living room's harsh artificial light. "Then they ask me about Hamas, or the jihad, or the people who make Sept. 11." Like many other Palestinian detainees, Abu-Shabayek reports being questioned extensively about his feelings toward Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "They ask me about Sharon, 'Do you like Sharon or not? What do you think about the Sharon visit to the Aqsa Mosque -- what's your opinion?'" Abu-Shabayek says. "They ask me, 'If we send you to Jordan, do you think to go to Israel and make trouble?'"
Still, he says, the interrogators weren't that bad. It's the guards who were cruel. "Let me say, the people who make the question, they are fair. The people who deal with us in the jail, they are very tough, especially with Muslim people." At one point, he was put in the hole for 21 days. He says he still doesn't know why.
The roundups were just the beginning. In November 2002, the Justice Department instituted the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or special registration, which required men from most Arab or Muslim countries to report to immigration officials to be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed. Of the 85,000 men who came forward to register, more than 13,000 were either deported or put into deportation proceedings. In December 2003, the administration suspended much of the program, but no relief was given to those it had already ensnared.
In between the start of post-9/11 sweeps and the beginning of special registration, there was the Absconder Apprehension Initiative, a Justice Department program to crack down on the 314,000 immigrants who remained in the country despite their deportation orders. As the Washington Post reported on Feb. 8, 2002, "Justice Department and FBI officials have said that the operation would focus first on about 6,000 immigrants from countries identified as al Qaeda strongholds, though the vast majority of absconders are Latin American."
It was the absconder initiative that ultimately led eight armed agents to burst into the Kesbehs' Houston house before daybreak on March 29 of that year. It led to Sharif and Alaa Kesbeh spending six months in prison together, and then to Alaa spending more time in prison alone. And it led to the fluorescent-lit, two-bedroom apartment in a conservative section of East Amman where today the Kesbehs try to figure out how to restart their lives.
It's not an easy place to be a newcomer, especially for Noor and her sisters. Boys play in the Kesbehs' potholed street, but girls stay inside. There's nowhere in their neighborhood to walk to except jumbled corner stores and butcher shops where skinned lambs hang whole outside. Many of the stores' concrete walls are decorated with photos of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the recently assassinated Hamas leader whose white-bearded face stares toward heaven on posters all over the poorer parts of the city.
Asmaa, who hardly ever goes out anymore, speaks longingly about America's parks, about the strangers who said hello as they jogged by. "Here, you cannot run," she says. "Oh my God, you cannot even walk."
The American government, of course, has the legal right to deport illegal immigrants, and has been doing so for years. Many of the provisions currently being used to arrest and deport the undocumented aren't even new -- they were enacted as part of the 1996 anti-terrorism law, passed in response to the Oklahoma City bombing. That terrorist attack had nothing to do with foreigners, but the government still responded to it by expanding the grounds on which immigrants can be deported and by removing much of the discretion that, in the past, might have allowed judges to issue waivers for people who, like the Kesbehs, had deep ties to their communities.
After 1996, says Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, "there was a restriction or elimination of the ability or the willingness of the government to consider cases on an individual basis and to exercise discretion to decide who should be prosecuted. Traditionally, with immigration laws, because of their severe consequences, there has always been a recognition that there ought to be an element of discretion."
The little discretion that remained disappeared almost entirely after Sept. 11, when Ashcroft made the persecution of Arab and Muslim immigrants official policy.
"What's happened since 9/11, there's been a specific targeting of particular communities, Muslim and Arab communities, to enforce immigration and visa violations that have traditionally not been enforced, and still are not enforced against other immigrants," says Guttentag. The arrests and deportations have slowed in recent months, but they haven't stopped, says Ahmad Tansheet, community outreach coordinator for the Muslim Civil Rights Center, a Chicago group that closely follows the issue. "We are receiving one or two complaints every day," he says.
Ashcroft has been explicit about using the immigration laws to target people from countries associated, if only tangentially, with terrorism. "Let the terrorists among us be warned," he said on Oct. 25, 2001. "If you overstay your visa -- even by one day -- we will arrest you."
Happily ensconced in Houston, the Kesbehs didn't think such warnings applied to them. "This family is the most peaceful family, maybe in the world," says Sharif. "All we'd been doing is concentrating on our kids, our business and trying to stay away from all troubles." Sharif made his living in America wholesaling flags -- American flags, Confederate flags, even Israeli flags. After Sept. 11, his business, SLS International, donated hundreds of American flags to a community he considered his own.
Indeed, despite the fact that Sharif spent six months in prison without criminal charges, despite the fact that they've lost their business and now live in a section of Amman that Noor describes as "like, so ghetto," even though Alaa's exact whereabouts and condition were for months a mystery to them, the Kesbehs still love the country that expelled them. They call themselves Americans without papers. They just want to go home.
