Regarding your chocolate chip cookie recipe, I am proud to say that I have never made it. I recognize in myself a certain compulsive behavior and I simply don't dare. But I still have it in safe place in case I need it for a very special occasion--or a catastrophic failure of will power, whichever comes first. I have duly annotated it with the missing ingredient.
Meanwhile, here's a touching story.
Snapshot of an Immigrant's Dream Fading
A Legacy of Sept. 11 Sweeps Pakistani to the Point of No Return: Deportation
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 24, 2002; Page A01
HUDSON, N.Y. -- Even five minutes before the INS agent showed up with handcuffs, Ansar Mahmood was convinced it wouldn't happen. He had put on his Domino's uniform, called his boss -- "I'll be there in half an hour" -- and then waited a bit in his attorney's Albany office, just in case he was wrong.
At that moment in January, it seemed like forever since Mahmood had fallen under the shadow of Sept. 11, since the days of the anthrax attacks, when local police picked him up for having his snapshot taken near a water treatment plant.
Within 48 hours, the FBI had cleared Mahmood of all suspicion that he was a terrorist, reducing this very slight and shy Pakistani's brush with the law to an unlikely nickname at work ("Hey, Big Terrorist Guy, get me some Cheesy Bread"). Plus, Mahmood had a green card, and wouldn't that guarantee any immigrant a happy ending?
Yet it was enough to end his immigrant's luck. Six months after Sept. 11, Mahmood faces the same problem as most of the 1,200 detainees picked up in the two months after the terrorist attack.
All but a small number have been cleared, but being cleared has turned out to be fairly meaningless. The Justice Department has not released information about the detainees, but sources there and at the Immigration and Naturalization Service say fewer than a fifth will likely remain in the United States. If they haven't been deported already, they are likely to be soon; and once deported, they can never return. Among the deportees are legal residents, such as Mahmood, and people married to Americans.
At first, this anonymous foreign mass represented America's fears of a terrorist threat in its midst. Now, their individual cases point to a different lesson: how immigrants in the United States can no longer skirt under the radar, float between visas, help a friend find a job -- how the winks and ambiguities and sudden, lucky amnesties that were the hallmarks of American immigration enforcement have vanished.
Most of the post-Sept. 11 detainees were caught in similar ways: While looking for evidence of terrorist connections, investigators came across lapses that might otherwise have stayed hidden or ignored -- visa overstays, illegal jobs. To detain these immigrants, INS agents revived laws that had gone largely unenforced or used old laws in new ways.
In Mahmood's case, he had helped an undocumented friend from Pakistan find an apartment, a common favor in the immigrant network. For that, he was charged with harboring an illegal immigrant -- a charge that, before Sept. 11, had been used almost exclusively against smugglers at border points.
FBI and INS agents have said they enforced the law strictly as a way to hold detainees in case new evidence should turn up linking them to terrorists. But as their vigilance has persisted, law enforcement has developed new habits.
Since Jan. 1, a task force including representatives of state and local police, the INS, the Customs Service and the FBI has met in Albany once a month to trade tips.
The U.S. attorney's office has received thousands of calls, said Tina Sciocchetti, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Mahmood's case. The office refers the calls to the INS or local police. A few weeks ago, a police officer stopped for gas at the usual place and tuned in to the attendant's horrible English. After he called the INS, agents discovered that the man had overstayed a student visa. He is being deported.
"I tell my clients, whether they are Arab, Mexican or Caribbeans, that things have changed," said Sophie Feal, who works with the Volunteer Lawyers Project in Buffalo. "A broken law now is a broken law, and they're not going to find much sympathy out there anymore."
An Unlucky Snapshot
From his quarters at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, it's obvious to Mahmood that he picked an unlucky moment to record his life in America. But on the afternoon of Oct. 9, he was only considering the best angle to capture the sun setting behind the Catskills.
Slender and owl-eyed, Mahmood looks even younger than 24. He cries openly when he feels sad or angry or even sentimental, and he has been crying a lot lately. He cries at the mention of Saiful Maluk, his favorite mountain resort in Pakistan, or of the deer that gather in the early morning behind his house in Hudson, south of Albany. He cries with gratitude when he mentions the American girls who had semi-adopted him during his two-year journey in the States: Jessica, his fellow waitress at Pizza City in Salisbury, Md., who taught him to drive; Kelly at the Domino's in Hudson, who stood up for him when the mayor came to grandstand at the store after the anthrax scare.
He cries hardest when he mentions his three sisters in Pakistan, who were able to finish school because of the $400 he sent home each month. "I am so lovable to them," he said.
"Working, working, working, this is all we know about your new life," his oldest sister, Mariam, had said when he called last fall. So he set out to give them a fuller picture of life in this small American town. He snapped pictures of his clean white apartment complex, the Domino's where he worked, scenic spots along his delivery route. With 36 shots gone, Mahmood figured he could push for one more.
After delivering a pizza at 5 p.m., he drove to what a regular customer had once told him was the highest point in Hudson, with the clearest view of the mountains. He asked the man at the guard post to take his picture, with the sun setting behind him, ripe as a tangerine.
As it happened, the hilltop looked over the town's main water treatment plant. And because of the anthrax scare, the town had posted two guards there that day. As one took Mahmood's picture, the second watched and then called the police.
They were waiting for Mahmood when he got back to Domino's.
"Why were you taking pictures of the water treatment plant?" an officer asked.
"What is this type of plant?" Mahmood answered.
Two days later, tests of the water came back negative for contamination, and investigators determined that Mahmood was just who he said he was: a legal immigrant taking a picture to send back home. But investigators had also turned up receipts showing he had paid the first month's rent and car insurance for a Pakistani couple living in Hudson illegally.
On Oct. 16, Mahmood pleaded guilty to harboring. Although he was given no jail time, he was automatically put into deportation proceedings.
Now, Mahmood says he did not know they were undocumented, but he also says he would never ask and could not have done anything differently. The woman, Aisha Younes, was his best friend's sister. "How I could not help her?" he said.
By the time Younes and her husband arrived, last July, Mahmood had been here just over a year and was at a point in his life -- his American life -- where he could help people.
Only three years ago, he was in sorry shape. He had just been rejected by the Pakistani army, and he could not understand why. He was in good health. His father was a retired officer with 25 years' service, and his brother was a sergeant.
Three days later, Mahmood received a letter: He had won the immigration lottery. Annually, the INS grants green cards to a minute number of qualified applicants worldwide in a lottery; 1999 was Mahmood's lucky year. His mother gave the postman 500 rupees -- a fortune for the family -- and ordered a cake.
The rejection, his whole life, now it all made sense: Mahmood, the most dutiful son of the five, had been chosen to save his family, to get the 11 of them out of their two-room house and into the Pakistani middle class. "God was giving me a chance," Mahmood said.
After skipping through a few cities in the United States, he found his calling at the friendly pizza joint in Salisbury. Where his co-workers saw dead-end summer jobs, Mahmood saw his redemption: The more you worked, the more you got paid, and Mahmood could work a lot, making and delivering pizzas 13, 14 hours a day.
By last October, he had two cars and a clean apartment, and he was sending home $400 a month. His family had a new color TV and a refrigerator, and his sisters were going to school. His father, who'd had a heart attack in September, could afford medication. They were going to move into a house this year.
'God Will Help Me'
In January, the INS moved to revoke his green card. On Jan. 24, the day before he was taken into INS custody, he worked his usual 13 hours. He still could not believe that he was getting deported.
"What can I do when I go back, no job, no money, just sit to look at my family to suffer?" he said. "My father has no medicine; my sisters have no school, nothing. They never deport me."
At 10 p.m., between deliveries, he pulled over and called his family.
"I will pray for you. God will be good to you," his father repeated over and over. To cheer him up, his sister tried to order a pizza in broken English she had learned at school.
"It is all right if you want to come home," his mother said.
Mahmood wasn't consoled.
"Mother, father, their heart is soft, but I never go home," he said after he had hung up. "All the laws, rules are against me, but God will help me."
The next morning, he dressed for work and reported to his attorney's office. Then the INS agent came with the handcuffs.
On Feb. 26, Mahmood went to his deportation hearing. That morning, he was in a decent mood, still hopeful. "I never leave this country," he said.
The seven other Sept. 11 detainees in the facility were past that stage. They had all been ordered deported and had agreed to go -- but the authorities still would not release them.
Mahmood was sure he would be at work the next week. He had hired an attorney, Rex Velasquez. Because Mahmood had a green card, Velasquez thought there might be a chance he would get bond. But because he had pleaded guilty to harboring, "we have to be realistic," Velasquez said. "There's not much we can do."
The hearing was brief. Before Velasquez could make his case, Judge John Reid signaled that it was not within his jurisdiction to grant Mahmood bond. Mahmood's choices were suddenly stark: to go through years of appeals, with his legal bills mounting and no way to pay them, or to agree, like most of his fellow Sept. 11 detainees, to be deported.
Mahmood didn't get all the details, but he got the idea. Afterward, he wept, so much that he borrowed a pair of glasses to cover his eyes.
So far, Mahmood is still fighting. On Tuesday, he filed petitions in federal and immigration court to stop or at least delay his deportation. After that, he fears, he will run out of money.
"Then maybe God will help me," he said.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
