Woman facing deportation at center of debate on post-9/11 policies
Originally published in the Centre Daily
Posted on Tue, Feb. 03, 2004
Woman facing deportation at center of debate on post-9/11 policies
BY DEBORAH HORAN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - (KRT) - Amina Silmi never meant to make the journey that changed her from a faceless illegal immigrant into a target of immigration authorities and a cause celebre for America's burgeoning Muslim activist community.
She was a passenger when her husband took a wrong turn during a family vacation to Niagara Falls and suddenly found himself locked in a long line of cars inching toward the customs booth at the Ontario border.
"This is the bridge to Canada," Silmi recalled a border officer telling them. "I said, `Oh my God, we can't go back. We can't go in reverse.'"
With that trip, Silmi, a Palestinian born in Venezuela and living in Cleveland, was no longer one of thousands of illegal immigrants waiting anonymously for federal bureaucrats to issue her proper papers. She had caught the unwanted attention of immigration authorities, who issued her a notice to appear in court and eventually ordered her deported.
Since that fateful day in 2000, she has become a symbol for many Muslims across America, including Chicago, who see in her treatment at the hands of immigration authorities everything they have come to despise about the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 policies.
On Wednesday morning, the 35-year-old Muslim mother of three American-born children will turn herself in to immigration authorities in Cleveland for deportation to Venezuela, where she holds citizenship.
She will decide whether to bring her children with her to a land they've never known, where she has no family, no job, no house and no friends - or whether to leave them with an aunt in America and go to Venezuela alone.
But mostly she will pray that the flurry of faxes and phone calls from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic presidential candidate, to Tom Ridge, secretary of Homeland Security, will halt her deportation order so that she doesn't have to make that choice.
"I'm waiting for a miracle right now," Silmi said, hours before she would have to surrender to federal authorities in Cleveland. "My hope is that somebody will hear me, because me and my kids, we're yelling for help."
On New Year's Eve, Kucinich heard Silmi's plea. The Ohio congressman read about her case in a newspaper and asked his chief legal counsel, Marty Gelfand, to draft a letter to Ridge asking him to halt Silmi's deportation. By coincidence, Gelfand found a fax in the office from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group known as CAIR, explaining Silmi's case.
Kucinich's letter accused immigration officials of breaking up a family with a "zealous interpretation" of immigration laws, Gelfand said. The congressman faxed the letter to Ridge on New Year's Day after hand-writing a personal appeal: "Her children are U.S. citizens, for God's sake!"
His actions captured the hearts - and potential votes - of Muslim and Arab American communities across the country.
Kucinich's efforts managed to halt Silmi's deportation for two weeks, according to Gelfand, while Ridge's office reviewed her case. But immigration authorities decided Jan. 26 that Silmi's appeals did not merit a reversal of the original deportation order, officials said.
"Any (appeal) that may have kept her from departing the U.S. has been exhausted," said Greg Palmore, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Detroit.
By Tuesday, immigration officials had secured the travel documents Silmi would need to enter Venezuela and had offered to pay for her children to travel with her, Palmore said.
The ruling has angered Muslims and Arab Americans who feel that Ridge should step in and stop Silmi's deportation on humanitarian grounds.
"This is a big lie that our security (requires us) to step all over people," said Safaa Zarzour, spokesman for CAIR in Chicago.
At the heart of Silmi's story, Muslim activists say, is the wrenching tale of a battered woman unaware of her legal rights in her adopted home.
In 1990, Silmi's family married her off at age 19 to an Arab man in Cleveland who carried a green card. They thought he would take care of her, she said. Instead, he beat her regularly by jabbing her body with a house key and eventually left her when she was six months pregnant with their first child, one of her lawyers said.
While they were married, he refused to sponsor her application for a green card, Silmi and her lawyers said.
They divorced, and Silmi married again, to a man named Ibrahim Salti, who also beat her, she said. She had two more children with Salti, including a 5-year-old boy who is mildly autistic and receives care here that Silmi said he is unlikely to find in Venezuela.
In 1998, Salti sponsored her request for a green card, but his own immigration woes soon undermined her application. Silmi, meanwhile, was told she could not leave the country with the application pending.
When the couple realized they had driven onto the bridge to Canada, Silmi got out of the car and tried to walk back to the American side. Salti, unable to turn around, entered Canada and then re-entered America a few minutes later. But the damage had been done. Border officials saw Silmi leave the car and stopped her, and then stopped her husband after he crossed back into America.
It was a trip that would eventually cost Salti his green card and land him back in his native Ramallah on the West Bank.
Salti had been in the process of appealing his own deportation order when he crossed into Canada. An immigration judge ruled that by driving into Canada he voluntarily left the country, and therefore had "abandoned" his appeal. He was deported in December and Silmi lost her sponsor for a green card.
An immigration judge, meanwhile, gave her 120 days to "voluntarily" depart the country. Silmi appealed to reverse the deportation order based on the 1996 Violence Against Women Act, a law with a provision to help battered women like Silmi stay in the country.
But a judge denied Silmi's appeal.
By nightfall Tuesday, she was mulling plans to give legal custody of her children to her sister as she packed her bags.
"She's not their mother," she said. "My children need their mother."
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