How to Fight Deportation
A conversation with Abraham Paolos
Abraham Paolos is the executive director of the non-profit Families for Freedom, which assists immigrants and refugees at risk of deportation due to prior criminal convictions.
DEFIANT spoke with Paolos at his Manhattan office.
D: Could you tell us a bit about your background as an immigrant?
A.P.: Yeah, so my father was a fighter for Eritrean independence. He was in an underground revolutionary cell, and he was part of the resistance for about five years. I was born in Sudan in 1981 when he was sort of on the run. We were able to get green cards in Sudan as refugees, so we could get resettled into the United States.
Later on in life I learned this was right after the 1980 Refugee Act was passed.
My father was basically in the country until 1992–’93, and after Eritrean independence, he was back there pretty much full time. Meanwhile, I grew up in uptown Chicago, in an immigrant neighborhood with refugees from El Salvador, Nigeria because of the Biafra conflict, Cambodia, Vietnam — as well as black Americans.
D: How old were you when you came over?
A.P.: They say nine months to a year. I was a baby.
D: So you basically have been here nearly your entire life. But you’ve run into situations where you’ve been in danger of deportation.
A.P.: Well, I also want to state that I’ve had a cousin deported, another cousin in immigration detention who was able to get out and third cousin at risk of deportation. Deportations and detention have sort of swirled around my life, but in the last five years I’ve made it an issue that I work on — and the catalyst was a personal experience.
While I was a first-semester New School [University] student in 2010, I got picked up in Brooklyn for a robbery that happened in my block. I clearly didn’t do it, but the NYPD came up with something that basically said that I might have done it.
It took about a week from my time of arrest to being released out of Rikers after I paid up a bond. It was at Rikers that a fellow prisoner started telling me about deportations. Particularly in Rikers Island, there was a trailer office that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was operating out of, interviewing non-citizens in the city complex.
So I was able to bond out, and I’ll never forget as I was walking out of Rikers, I passed two ICE officers in the parking lot. Not to say that they were coming for me, necessarily, but they were coming for a whole bunch of non-citizens, doing interviews.
D: So, you were in danger of being deported whether or not you were convicted?
A.P.: Yeah, because of priors I had back in the ’90s. When I came here in the ’80s my family suffered a lot of poverty, and the ’90s there were a lot of issues in our community that we had to deal with — essentially the war on drugs and the war on crime.
D: Broken windows policing?
A.P.: They always have cute names for these things. Broken windows, Operation Shield. Basically, there was a heavy presence of police in these communities. The first time I had handcuffs around my wrist, I was 14 years old and they thought the folks I was with had a gun. Between the ages of 17 to 20, I started being convicted of misdemeanors.
So I had prior contact with the criminal system, which is not hard to do if your black and poor. So when I got to Rikers, regardless of whether the case was dismissed or not, I was still at risk of deportation. Which is why my fellow prisoner was like, “You need to get out of here.”
D: What sorts of convictions put you at risk?
A.P.: I think my first conviction was jumping a turn style, which is theft of labor. And I had stolen a book from a library, which is like a two-year sentence, but you know, obviously I got supervision, six months …
D: That’s enough to get you deported?
A.P.: It’s not like I checked out the book and didn’t return it. I couldn’t get a library card because I essentially didn’t have a home, I was homeless — a “precarious housing situation” I ought to say for the liberals. So because I still loved to read, I went back and stole these books. That’s a class-A misdemeanor, because it’s a maximum of a year sentence.
There were a couple of arrests out there. But that [the library book] was my biggest conviction. The one before — I got stopped and frisked. They claimed that I had marijuana. I was incarcerated for like three days through the precinct and through central booking.
D: Three days? Isn’t that something like, you either do or don’t have marijuana on you?
A.P.: It was dismissed right then and there. But it had to go through the system. Paperwork. I think people have got to understand there’s a system out there that has consistently, aggressively and methodically excluded black and brown people out of social, economic and political life in the United States of America, and a lot of that is through physical removal — like the physical sort of exclusion out of our society — putting us in physical cages and what have you.
The criminal legal system enforces laws that are really based in white supremacy. The police are overly targeted, and harass us on a day to day basis. They bring us in front of a judge, 92-to-97 percent of us plead guilty to a felony nationwide. In New York, it’s like 98 percent.
You’re always going to be guilty. And once you have the felony conviction, housing, student loans, finding a job are all hard to get. Voting is impossible … Then you have the prison system, which is a warehouse.
I was in there once with three boys in their softball uniforms. One had slipped home at one point because they wanted to smoke a blunt in the park after the game. These things, particularly in our communities, it’s as familiar as going to the gym for certain people. So we get locked up for a lot of really dumb things. But really we get locked up for being poor, black and brown.
D: So, what’s the process by which refugees or immigrants are deported for a crime?
A.P.: Once you commit a crime, that refugee status goes out the window. There’s essentially two types of deportable folks. Those without valid papers, and those with valid papers who have had contact with the criminal justice system. That makes you a deportable person — even if you’re here legally, you’re still deportable. You can be a green-card holder, student visa, H1V visa.
You’ll be put in deportation proceedings — depending on the crime — and while you’re in deportation proceedings, you can’t file asylum. What you have [as a defense] are things like Withholding of Removal or Geneva Convention Against Torture.
Basically, these are international statutes which say “you cannot return this person to this country,” but you can deport them if another country will take them. But if the conditions for you to get refugee status are no longer there — like if the war is over — they’ll deport you back to that country.
D: Can you apply for citizenship?
A.P.: I have to be careful about [discussing] that. I tried to apply back in 2003, but I was denied because I had this recent library book incident. After that, applying for citizenship really requires legal counsel, getting help. Am I at risk [of deportation]? Absolutely. A lot of us are at risk
D: I recall reading in an article on your organization that the number of people deported based on prior criminal charges has gone up from 20 to 60 percent.
A.P.: I think within the last 10 to 15 years. This wasn’t like a ground swell of crime or whatever. [Violent crime rates in the United States have dropped significantly since the mid-1990s.] Prior to the 1990s, I think there wasn’t a system like that. It was mainly deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans around the southwest border.
Then came the 1996 laws, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the illegal Immigration Reform And Immigrant Responsibility Act. These laws essentially expand deportable crimes to oblivion [from two to 50 cases], made things retroactive, so what was then not deportable is now deportable retroactively, and instituted mandatory detention and deportation, which basically meant you get no bond and no relief and no lawyer, right?
It’s a really screwed-up system.
Afterwards, you start to see a spike in folks who’ve had contact with the criminal system getting deported. But it really wasn’t until after 9/11 that they realized they didn’t need to change immigration laws to enforce them in the way they wanted to.
D: They already had a law that gave them a broad mandate.
A.P.: Mind you, it’s only 60 percent of the overall deportation number, but within the interior of the country — non-border states — 83 percent of those that have gotten deported had contact with the criminal system. So what we’re seeing is this morphing of two horrible systems. Now criminality not only excludes you from civil, social, economic, political life — if you weren’t born here, it permanently banishes you.
D: I understand that what counts as a deportable felony —“aggravated felony,” which includes misdemeanors like shoplifting — was expanded from two to 50 different categories.
A.P.: Yes, I’d just like to put it in a caveat that no matter what in the judicial system, a person will never be ordered deported by a judge, ever. A judge will sentence a person to three years, five years, a hundred years, life, even death — but the judicial branch will never say the sentence for a crime is deportation.
The crime doesn’t matter. We have to understand that the only reason it’s an issue right now is one person was born here, and the other wasn’t and didn’t naturalize.
D: Can you share some examples of these laws in action?
A.P.: Once, I got a call from a Jamaican mother who had two children. She was a green-card holder, and had been living here her whole life. In 2002 she was at a roller-skating rink with her then-husband, who got in a bit of a scuffle with the security guard at the rink.
She breaks it up between the two of them while the cops are showing up. She gets charged and convicted of obstruction of justice.
This is the one conviction that she has. I don’t think she did a lot of time [for the crime itself] — maybe a week, two weeks. Seven years later she applies for citizenship — and was then locked up for a year and a half in immigration detention. I don’t think she’s in the country anymore. I don’t know what happened to the kids.
In another case, there was a 19-year-old mom that had stolen baby formula from a CVS. She was locked up for about a year and ended up getting deported. Her child at the time was only two or three months old.
D: Her kid was presumably a U.S. citizen?
A.P.: Absolutely. And you know, the retroactivity of the laws is really bad. There was this man who had a beautiful family, a house, a business and he had one conviction from 1988. He was in college at the time and he was arrested for possessing less than a hundred dollars of cocaine in 1988.
Twenty or 30 years later they show up at his house and they call him a criminal alien, and they deport him to Jamaica. His wife is doing an amazing fight for her husband back and I think he will be able to make it back at some point, but if it were not for her, he would be essentially permanently banned from the United States of America.
D: Doesn’t retroactive punishment violate the ex-post facto clause in the constitution?
A.P.: No, the laws in 1996 are retroactive, that’s the evil genius about it. So even if you did something that wasn’t deportable then, it’s deportable now. They can now come and take you away and destroy your life.
D: So, there’s probably people in this country that think those people had a rare chance to live here, and there’s lots of people that want to live here but can’t who have a clean record. Why should we give them a break? Why should we have a more lenient policy to people with prior convictions?
A.P.: Because we live in a racist society. Immigrants have always been coming to the United States of America, up until the 1950s, more than 80 percent of immigrants came from Europe. By the ’80s and the ’90s, more than 86 percent were black and brown people.
ll of the sudden, the question is, “Do we deserve a break?” Really, the only difference is that the people are now darker.
Now, there are probably hundreds of thousands of undocumented Irish people here, particularly on the East Coast, and this question is never brought up for them. If they do something wrong, no one would say, “We gave you this break and now it’s over.”
No one talks about a second chance for white folks, right? The second chance part is just so unrealistic. What are you talking about? People get more than one chance in life, and to sort of count them just for us … I think a lot of that question is actually rooted in racism.
Now, some mainstream viewers may be saying, “You came in, and you have committed a so-called crime.” Well, I believe in consequences. But the consequence has already been paid. What we’re actually talking about is double jeopardy, which the United States constitution is very much against. Most Western legal instruments try to make sure you’re not getting punished twice for the same crime.
So why should someone stay if they committed a crime? Because the consequence of that wasn’t deportation. The judicial branch would say, “We would never sentence anyone to deportation for a crime.”
D: So, out of curiosity, are there any crimes that you would consider do merit deportation?
A.P.: None at all, because all those crimes that would be severe enough, like say murder — that would be a situation in which the judicial branch would probably give him life. The wild thing about it is in the judicial branch, it doesn’t matter if you are a citizen or a non-citizen.
I would just like to be consistent on that, right? I would say that no crime warrants deportation, and the judicial branch agrees with me on that.
D: So, could you tell me about what Families for Freedom is, and what it does?
A.P.: Families for Freedom has been around since 2002. We were founded by three people who were directly affected by detention. Some were dealing with an uncle, father or husband being detained. Others were organizers. It really started out as a support network after 9/11, when a lot of home raids were happening, people getting picked up and disappeared. Then it morphed into an advocacy-type network.
Now we basically have three major areas. We do support — teach people to know their rights, the system, the structures around detention and deportation. Second, we do a lot of education around sociopolitical history. And finally, we do a lot of advocacy, through grass-roots campaigns fighting for things on a policy level that will help us out.
D: How do you stay funded?
A.P.: Foundations and grass-roots funding. It’s always difficult, because we are people that come from the intersection of the criminal legal system and the deportation system. We had to focus on the fact that we’re families, that we’re human beings with human rights, and those that could really understand it from that angle would be able to do that.
I think now it’s becoming a lot more boutique; people in the funding world are getting more hip to it.
D: Is the boutique thing good?
A.P.: I think it’s good that people understand the issue. And for those that are directly affected, there are more services out there, which is always a good thing.
I think that at times — once there’s money into something, you start to see organizations start to creep. That’s just the non-profit industry. Once funders say, “Hey, there’s money to do this,” everybody’s like, “Okay, we can do that!”
As opposed to looking at it like this is a need that we have, and we need resources to do that. I think that’s a really problematic situation. I’m concerned that the issue itself could be an income generator, an industry for liberal progressives gentrifying my community with their salary.
D: Are there strategic objective that FFF would pursue if it had more resources?
A.P.: I think in general, we would love to have the resources to be able to repeal AEDPA and IRAIRA legislation. On a more educational level, we would like to reach out to more directly affected communities and really have a political analysis that goes beyond deportation and ties everything together by talking about race and class in the U.S., to let people understand that citizenship is not going to be the silver bullet.
You know, what we really need are basic rights that prevent the fear of detention and deportation from coming to our communities.
D: Are there any politicians or leaders that are actually doing anything to help your cause?
A.P.: It’s really hard. In my tenure there really hasn’t been much on this. I think once the narrative on the DREAMers came up, it basically gave leaders and politicians an out.
D: Under Obama, it was widely reported that he deported more people than any president before.
A.P.: Yeah, he did, but it was a result of the trend. It doesn’t really matter which puppet is running the government, you just have a steady increase in deportations since the ’90s. Watch, Trump is going to deport more people than Obama. That was really just the way that trend was going. You have a lot of folks in the immigrant rights movement sort of feeling — “let’s just get what we can get right now.”
Which was a problem because it divided our families.
D: Let’s focus on New York. Some say it’s a sanctuary city for immigrants. Is that true?
A.P.: I think it’s true in relationship with city agencies — immigration status, by and large, is considered confidential information. Executive Order 41 basically says city employees cannot inquire about a person’s immigration status unless it is important for that service. Caveat, though — once it comes to law-enforcement or the criminal legal system, all bets are off.
D: So local police departments can still share data?
A.P.: They may be able to find out if you are citizen or not a citizen, whether they can inquire about it, what they want to do about it. They’re not impacted by sanctuary policies.
D: But aren’t they city employees?
A.P.: We’ve made that argument before, but they’ve pushed back on that. This fight’s been done before. Executive Order 41 was an amendment to Executive Order 34. The federal government came in 2003, right after 9/11, and sued New York City, saying, “You can’t do that when it comes down to law enforcement.” The federal government won.
So, this discussion around why the NYPD, staffed by city employees, is able to handle this data that no other city employees can, I think, is an excellent question.
D: Are there any steps that could make New York more of a sanctuary?
A.P.: I would say, if it’s going to be confidential information, it should be confidential information always, unless the access to the service depends on whether you are a citizen or not a citizen. So if the judicial branch doesn’t really care —
D: Just stop collecting the information, period.
A.P.: Yeah, the only time that should really matter is — are you leaving the country? Are you coming back into the country? When it came down to the earlier European immigrants, nobody cared where you were from. There were obviously stereotypes and prejudice, absolutely, but it wasn’t like the way it is now.
But in general, whether you’re citizen or not a citizen really shouldn’t matter in the United States of America.
D: So, at the national level, things seem grimmer for immigrants with prior convictions under Trump.
A.P.: Grimmer than what? Grimmer than 60 percent of us being deported already? Really? This is why I think we need to sit with this for a second before we start acting like the sky is falling right now, as opposed to looking at poor black communities that have gone through a lot. Nobody’s interviewing them!
When Obama became president, instead of folks having his movement saying, “Hey, let’s have this real conversation!” No — liberals, progressives and everyone slept on the situation. It reminds me of the image of George Bush on that warship with the banner [reading] “mission accomplished.”
Is it going to get worse for us? People must not have understood how bad it was for us, how bad it is for us right now.
D: What do you think is the most effective way to fight the situation we’re in now?
A.P.: Stop worrying about the conservatives. They’re going to be racist. The problem is really that the liberals and the progressives fell asleep. There was no resurgence of racism in America [in 2016] — the racism has always been here. Obama just eased the liberals, but conservatives were just like, “Now we’ve really got to try harder.”
Here’s the other thing, it’s a matter of degrees. How much worse is this than under Clinton? For those of us who are oppressed, who are denied freedom, that’s such a sad conversation. Take for example mass incarceration. This is a liberal Madonna, as if the problem is that they’re locking too many of us up.
That’s like saying there were too many slaves. The problem isn’t that there are too many prisoners, the problem is that we’re incarcerating.
I’m hoping we can have conversations around that, and really starting to say, “This approach to progress has to be really reevaluated, because it’s what got us where we’re at right now.”
D: What are measures that people at risk of being deported can take?
A.P.: What I would say to my community about the Trump policies is the same thing I’d say under Clinton. Don’t answer the door. Stay silent. Talk to a lawyer.
Number two, folks should have emergency contingency plans or safety plans. They should really discuss with their family about, hey, this is who’s insecure. If something does happen, how would we like to move forward?
D: What of people who don’t belong to a vulnerable communities — what are things that they can do to help?
A.P.: Listen, really listen. I think that’s been lacking. If someone who’s not directly affected wants to helps somebody who is, do not support that person in the way you can support. Support that person in the way they want to be supported. Solutions, policies and so forth should come out of that.
We should be looking to have long-term solutions. So for people without papers — I would just say, “Give them papers.” Find a way. We found a way before. Why is that not happening? And we really need to get into the conversation we should have had during the Obama years on race and class, when everyone thought that was all over.
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