To Be Young, Ambitious, and a Target
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This memorandum rescinds the June 15, 2012 memorandum entitled “Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children,” which established the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”). For the reasons and in the manner outlined below, Department of Homeland Security personnel shall take all appropriate actions to execute a wind-down of the program, consistent with the parameters established in this memorandum.
—Memorandum on Rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
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You might consider Rezai Karim to be almost the poster boy for seeking the American Dream through immigration. Brought to this country as a five-year-old, he spent the next thirty years pursuing every opportunity for advancement, resulting in education, a good job, and even attempting to find a way to regularize his status.
On closer examination, you can see how precarious his story really was. Growing up in New York, it wasn’t until high school that he realized the limitations being undocumented would put on his life. He had a hard time finding a job to support his ambition to go to college, finally finding a position at Dunkin’ Donuts. The same cloud of uncertainty hung over life after college. Karim decided against pursuing a law career, unsure where he’d be able to get work. As he put it, “I couldn’t do anything for myself.”
In 2012, the government offered a glimmer of hope with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Almost forty years before, my father had uncovered the arcane workings of deferred action in the immigration service through a series of actions under the Freedom of Information Act. The 2012 version of DACA was more straightforward. Immigrants who had arrived in the United States before the age of sixteen and were under thirty-one years of age at the start of the program could apply for work authorization and avoid deportation. There were drawbacks. The status had to be renewed every two years for a fairly hefty fee, and it didn’t allow for any permanent change of status—not citizenship, not even residency. That didn’t stop more than 800,000 young people from seeking DACA status. It allowed Karim to move to Roanoke, Virginia, and start a new job in the computer engineering field.
On August 20, 2016, the first day of moving into a new apartment, this success story turned into a horror show. Karim and a female companion were enjoying the pool in the residential complex when it began to rain. As Karim opened the door to his apartment, they were accosted by a stranger, Waqil Farooqui, who had been sitting in the stairwell, smoking a cigarette. Farooqui approached and Karim felt a sharp blow; he had been stabbed with a knife. As he fell to the floor, he heard his assailant cry, “Allahu Akhbar!”—“God is great!” Although his Muslim family is not religious, Karim knew that this phrase in private was a prayer, but in public it meant a terrorist attack. Fighting off unconsciousness, he forced himself back to his feet to confront his attacker, who had now turned his attention to the young lady.
In New York, Karim had been an amateur boxer, taking part in the Golden Gloves tournament. Now he was fighting for his life, biting his adversary and grabbing his wrist to wrestle for the knife. The couple managed to escape down the stairs and out of the building with Farooqui following, but he ran off into the night as Karim screamed for someone— anyone—to stop him. Only when Farooqui fled did Karim and his companion realize they were covered in blood. They collapsed as onlookers called for medical assistance. Police found a large amount of blood in the apartment and a bloody trail leading to the victims. Karim and the young woman were taken to the local emergency room. Karim had suffered a neck wound serious enough that some speculated the attack had been an attempt at an ISIS-style decapitation. For Karim it was enough that the slash was almost long enough to have severed his jugular.
A short time later their attacker appeared at the hospital asking for treatment for damage he’d received in the fight. He was quickly taken into custody and admitted his attack. Farooqui said he had left his home that evening to “clear his head.” He took a large kitchen knife with him, and in the course of the evening, he had heard voices calling him stupid and urging him to attack people. He did not know Karim, having chosen him and his companion at random. Upon hearing this, Karim said perhaps it was better that he’d been chosen instead of some of the kids who had been at the swimming pool.
Farooqui, an American-born U.S. citizen, had a record of some traffic infractions and had appeared on the FBI’s radar as a possible self-radicalized terror suspect. There’s a rather grim saying in the news business—“If it bleeds, it leads.” Gory stories tend to be played up, and beyond its gruesome aspects was the suggestion of terrorism. This was a case guaranteed to draw media attention, not just from the local newspapers but from the Washington Post and even the Daily News in New York. Various news sources reported that Farooqui had gone to Europe and made it as far as Turkey, perhaps in an attempt to reach Syria and the forces of ISIS. ISIS, however, did not claim responsibility for the attack, and Farooqui’s lawyer claims that he had no contact with any organizations—that his actions were attributable to mental illness.
My office was already working for Karim to extend his DACA status, but now we would also have to manage the media—to find a balance between serving his immigration interests and protecting as much of his privacy as possible. He appeared in a Newsweek article about the attack, but we made sure his face was obscured in any photographs.
That attack also opened another possible legal avenue for Karim—the U visa. This program was established for crime victims who had suffered considerable physical or mental abuse due to crime and who assist law enforcement in prosecution. For many undocumented immigrants, it has become the equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket—after three years, a person with a clean record and a U visa can apply for a green card, and five years after that, for naturalization as a citizen.
Like that mythical Golden Ticket, though, the U visa has become harder and harder to acquire. By law, only 10,000 U visas may be granted each year. Although the U visa was created in 2000, actual visas were not issued until 2009. In that year, almost 11,000 petitions for the status were received, and there was already a backlog of more than 21,000. The last full year for which we have records is 2016, when more than 30,000 petitions were received. The prospects are that 2017 petitions will exceed that number, with a present backlog of more than 135,000.
We had abundant proof that Karim had suffered severe physical injuries from Farooqui’s attack. The question was prosecution. Remember the shoe bombing case? When Richard Reid was arraigned, he decided to plead guilty, and no prosecution was necessary. The federal authorities decided not to give Kwame James a U visa, although they had promised him they would do so when they were eager to make a case.
Farooqui was held without bond at the Western Virginia Regional Jail. A grand jury turned in an indictment in his case early in December 2016. Farooqui’s lawyers were laying the groundwork for an insanity defense and arguing to have testimony about him shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” barred from being mentioned in court. They did not succeed in having that testimony barred, and Farooqui ended up pleading guilty days before his trial was set to begin. He had been charged with two counts of aggravated malicious wounding, which is a Class 3 felony in the Commonwealth of Virginia, punishable by a prison sentence of up to twenty years and a $100,000 fine. At the final sentencing on January 18, 2018, Farooqui received sixteen years in prison.
In the meantime, we’ve also been working with federal prosecutors on a terrorism case for the attack. Although Farooqui’s attorney insists that his mental state precipitated his actions, Farooqui had engaged in activities that brought him to the attention of the FBI. However, his case didn’t represent any serious wrongdoing until his attack. No terrorist organization officially claimed responsibility for his deeds, but we would like to know whether he was influenced by any groups or whether he had self-radicalized in seeking to act out so violently.
Karim and his friend have healed after this bloody assault—at least physically. The young lady still suffers from panic attacks, and Karim has been winding down his job with an eye to returning to New York. Like it or not, he’s had to admit that even the middle of Virginia isn’t necessarily a safe haven anymore. A U visa has allowed for a relatively happy ending for Karim’s immigration fears, but he is only one out of more than 800,000 young people left in limbo by the Trump administration’s decision to terminate DACA.
The deferred action program was never supposed to be a final fix. It was to be a temporary measure in the expectation that legislative action such as the DREAM Act would pass Congress. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and when President Obama tried to expand DACA, twenty-six states—both red and blue states—sued to block it. In the months since Donald Trump came to office, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Idaho, Kansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia—red states that have made significant moves against immigrants—have now sued to declare DACA unconstitutional.
I think it’s bad public policy to promise rights to people and then yank them away. After all, the people we’re talking about are young Americans. They speak English without accents and have only vague memories of the countries from which they came. Various states have invested in their futures, educating them, and now political factions want to reject them right when that investment is about to pay off. They don’t care that 91 percent of DACA recipients are employed and that firing them would cause economic dislocation. Nor do they care that a number of these young people are serving in our armed forces. They’d rather waste all that human talent, not to mention the trust of a huge swathe of our population.
Many who signed up for DACA in hope now feel fear, wondering if they’ve only volunteered to put their names on deportation lists. It’s a disheartening situation. The U visa program was designed to create better bonds between the immigrant community and law enforcement. But for political reasons, in some localities law enforcement won’t certify that immigrants are helping in cases. Programs that were started to find gang members and terrorists are instead being aimed at immigrants without criminal connections. And the continuing political tirades have only deepened the distrust in immigrant communities. In a 2008 survey, 50 percent of Hispanic immigrants felt just some or very little confidence that law enforcement would treat them fairly. Still, 78 percent said they would contact the police if they suffered a violent crime, and the percentage rose to 84 percent in the case of a property crime. In 2013, however, a full 44 percent of Latino immigrants felt they would be less likely to call the police as crime victims “for fear that they will ask me or people I know about our immigration status.” There have been no large-scale surveys since the advent of the Trump administration, but several cities with large immigrant populations have recorded significant drops in the number of crime reports from immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.
It can’t be a good idea to encourage crime in any neighborhood. There’s no guarantee that a criminal who preys on immigrants won’t also attack other citizens. Nor is it good in the long term for a nation even to consider driving away productive citizens. For most of the twentieth century, the United States benefited as the recipient of a “brain drain” from Europe, and no nation that drove off large amounts of its human capital did well. Once Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the former Soviet bloc were powerful entities. Each in its way drove millions of young, educated, and entrepreneurial citizens to leave. Is it really wise to follow that example?