Stranger and More Brutal Than Fiction
by Lorraine Adams
Adams, a Pulitzer Prize winning former Washington Post reporter, looks at what happens when innocents are swept up in counter-terror efforts.
Since Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad turned out to be a Pakistani native, it’s been a trying season for Muslim immigrants—especially those from the would-be terrorist’ s home country. The Feds have told Pakistan leaders “Check your family and staff for terrorist ties.” Terrorists are “hiding within our midst,” warned White House Counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan. Last week, and no doubt in the coming weeks too, we can expect a big spike in the number of Pakistanis arrested for immigration violations and related charges.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? For the guilty, yes. For those who are neither guilty nor entirely innocent, the aftereffects will last—and last.
1999 was a similar season — for Algerians. Customs agents discovered explosives in the trunk of a rental car at the end of that year and arrested the driver, Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian as he tried to cross the Canadian border into Seattle. The country was in a state of heightened alert as turn of the millennium was but two weeks away, and, after Ressam’s arrest, government officials began detaining Algerians across the United States, almost all on immigration charges.
One of those then detained was Aziz Ouali, a 26-year-old East Boston dishwasher. Hunted by terrorists in his own country during the brutal Algerian civil war of the 1990s that left over a 100,000 civilians massacred, Aziz stowed away on a natural gas tanker from his hometown of Arzew, Algeria in 1997. He spent 52 days in the hold, and then dove into Boston harbor and swam ashore. Eventually he found other Arzew stowaways to live with, and one of them, Abdelghani Meskini, had a cell phone number that was found in the pocket of Ressam, the Algerian with the explosives.
As a reporter for The Washington Post, I wrote about Meskini in a Sunday magazine piece that ran in June 2001. I wanted the article to include Aziz’s story—an account of a young Muslim Arab who didn’t become a terrorist—but my editor at the time found his tale too ambiguous and thus too inconsequential to warrant more than a passing reference.
Frustrated after twenty years of writing simple-to-grasp articles despite the fact that my reporting often uncovered tangles of conflicting facts, I quit. I was in New York City three months later, when Saudi terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center towers, and killed the first boy I’d ever kissed along with 2,752 other people.
In the days afterwards, I sat down to write what would become a novel about Aziz. In 2004, Knopf published it to critical acclaim. Aziz, whose English wasn’t strong enough to read Harbor, never knew of it. His wife, a Boston secretary named Kim Sullivan, did, but she said the period the novel drew upon was too distressing to her husband and she felt it better not to mention it to him.
Today, Aziz sits in a Plymouth County jail in Massachusetts. He’s been there since last August. Aziz isn’t allowed phone calls, so I can’t talk to him. A few weeks ago, Kim, Aziz’s wife of nine-years, called. She was distraught. Ten years after Aziz’s arrest on Jan. 4, 2000, Karen-Anne Haydon, Boston Field Office Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, had ordered Aziz’s deportation. To stay with him, Kim, a blue-eyed, blond and Irish Catholic woman who pronounces Boston as “Bahston,” would have to move to Algeria, a country beset with Islamist insurgency and anti-American hostility. Her parents, in their seventies, were a wreck.
Aziz’s story today is, once again, a phantasmagoria of complication. There are failings on all sides.
There’s the government, which granted conditional resident status in May 2002, but never sent Aziz the green card he was entitled to. He applied, per instructions, for a replacement card, but for four years, officials stamped his passport so he could travel in and out of the United States to see his parents, and told him not to worry. Indeed, if the card had simply arrived, Aziz would probably not be facing deportation.
There’s his lawyer, Jerry Friedman, who never filed a required form I-751 asking that the conditions on Aziz’s resident status be removed, an oversight he says he regrets, but can’t realistically remedy. “I feel somewhat responsible,” he told me over the phone last week. “I should have at some point picked up on the fact that he should have filed. But I can’t keep track of when and where all my clients have to file every last item.” Friedman’s right: the immigration bureaucracy is a morass of filings, forms and deadlines. But, the fact remains: if Friedman had filed the form, Aziz would not be eligible for deportation.
Finally, there’s Aziz’s record. When he landed in America, he was arrested twice, both times for shoplifting a pair of sneakers--the first time in the months right after he swam ashore, and a year later, in 1998. He stayed in jail a night each time, and with no English and little understanding of the criminal justice system, believed he’d paid his debt to society. As a result, he didn’t mention the arrests when he applied for permanent resident status in 2001. The government, which had fingerprinted him numerous times and scoured his criminal record, didn’t find the misdemeanor arrests, both of which were ultimately dismissed. In her decision, however, Field Office Director Hayden found that Aziz’s failure to disclose the prior misdemeanor charges part of “a flagrant disregard for the laws of the United States.” The government did discover the arrests—but not until December 2005. It was then officials told Aziz he’d never filed the I-751 form. Plus: deportation proceedings were initiated at that point, but only because of the unfiled I-751 form. Kim and Aziz filed the form in 2006. But they needed $2000 to file it and the raft of other forms they needed to re-file. Aziz’s work as a housepainter had dried up, and out of work, he accompanied an old Arzew acquaintance on a shoplifting expedition to a Maine outlet store.
He was found guilty of criminal trespass and spent 21 days in a York jail. Shortly after, Kim and Aziz fought bitterly—and he pushed her. She got a ten-day restraining order and he slept in a motel for two nights. “I think he was frustrated,” she told me. “And he lost it and blamed me. “This is your country, these are your laws,” he was saying. We were both hot-tempered and he didn’t hurt me. I wish I’d not done it.” The trespassing conviction and Kim’s order figured in Hayden’s deportation decision.
Plenty of blame to go around, right? Well, it would take another novel to adequately untangle what landed Aziz in jail seven months ago and sped the deportation proceedings.
After the shoplifting fiasco, Aziz joined a company to make ends meet. Last summer, the economy in free all, he was laid off. The boss told him he was eligible for unemployment. The first two checks, about $180 every two weeks, arrived; when the third didn’t, Aziz went to the unemployment office to inquire. He brought folders of his now voluminous immigration records; Kim knew he would be asked to prove his green card status. The woman at the counter studied the documents. She was about to give Aziz a check when her supervisor interceded, took Aziz lost check claim form and, Kim told me, “”ripped it up in his face.” Aziz asked her, “What are you doing?” She said, “You don’t have a green card. Get one and come back.” After all the years of waiting for a green card, Aziz made a fatal error. As Kim tells it, he said, “Do you know what I’ve been going through to get a green card? I have a green card; it just never got mailed to me. I’ve been here ten years working, ten years paying taxes and here’s the order from the judge. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to go to the JFK building and get a gun and make them give me a green card?”
Aziz left the unemployment office. Senator Kennedy had just died and Boston was swarming with federal agents; as the country had been at the turn of the millennium ten years earlier, Boston was on high alert. Two U.S. Homeland Security federal protective service agents turned up Aziz’s parents’ house in Winthrop two days later. They were looking for Aziz. Kim’s mother called the couple, and Aziz spoke to the agents on the phone. Kim said he got off and said everything was fine. But the agents kept her parents’ house under surveillance that night. The next day her mother and father started out, as they did every weekend, for a drive to their New Hampshire cottage. Agents pulled them over in East Boston. “My mother called me,” Kim explained. “She was in a real dither. My father was out of his mind.” Aziz and Kim drove to the parking lot where her parents were detained and met the agents. Kim says everyone was friendly. The agents frisked Aziz, searched his truck and discussed his immigration problems.
“Everything seemed cool,” Kim recalled. “All of a sudden a white Murano comes flying into the parking lot and four guys come out. They cuffed Aziz and took him away.”
Aziz has been at Plymouth County Correctional Facility ever since. He still has time to appeal last month’s deportation ruling, but Kim says he’s lost heart, and fears he won’t give her the go-ahead to keep trying.
“It’s a very sad case,” Aziz’s lawyer told me.” I keep hoping the judge is going to wake up in the middle of the night like I do and say, “I really screwed up this case.””
Lorraine Adams, a Pulitzer Prize winning former Washington Post reporter is the author of two novels, Harbor, and The Room and the Chair, Knopf, February 2010.
