As a nurse in the intensive care unit, Urooj Alavi said she witnessed the tributes that local communities have paid to her and other fitness by leading the opposition rate to the new coronavirus.
But Alavi said she is no longer looking for parades, flyovers or billboards, but rather needs the United States government to release her husband from immigration detention and allow him to remain in the United States with his children.
“Let me keep my circle of relatives together,” Alavi, an American citizen living in Anaheim, California, told CBS News. “Stop your deportation. “
“It will help one of the nurses here,” he added. This will be part of the honor of the in this country. “
Alavi’s husband, Amir Ali, 47, has been struggling to stay in the United States for more than 15 years, facing another 4 periods of migrant detention. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not been able to download the necessary documents to deport him to Pakistan, until now.
Ali, who has no history of criminals, was recently transferred to an ICE detention center in southern Arizona to await deportation, who told his wife that he had tested positive for COVID-19, an ICE diagnosis said he might not verify it. without renunciation of confidentiality.
ICE has reported more than 6,500 cases of COVID-19, totaling about 800 assets among immigrants in its custody. At least eight immigrants died of coronavirus while in the agency’s custody. Others were hospitalized after being infected, but ICE did reveal this count.
In an interview with CBS News, Ali, a cancer survivor with a history of asthma, said he had suffered fever, pain, diarrhea and loss of smell in recent days, but Ali noted that he was not only concerned about his health. , saying his deportation to Pakistan would devastate his U. S. -based family, which includes his wife and two children, a 6-year-old boy and a young boy born last year.
“It would break our family,” Ali said on a phone call from ICE’s service processing center in Florence.
Ali said he feared for his children’s mental well-being and his wife’s physical state. “For the first two weeks, the one-year-old had trouble sleeping at night. Every time I called him, he’d say, ‘baba, slime. ‘”
“My wife works in an extensive COVID care unit and treats 10 to 12 patients every day and every day she goes to work. So, your fear is that we don’t have a system. If she gets sick, what will happen to our children?Ali asked.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed an emergency request for “suspension of deportation” with ICE, urging the firm to allow Ali to remain in the United States with his family. California Senator and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris also spoke after Alavi asked for her help.
Ali was first arrested through ICE in October 2004. He had been stripped of his parole permanent apartment in the United States after an allegation of marital fraud that Ali denies. In 2005, an immigration sentence did not deny the violation of marriage fraud still ordered Ali’s deportation on the grounds that his legal prestige in the United States had been revoked.
The Pakistani immigrant turned to the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but his programs were denied and he remained detained by ICE until November 2006. Ali said he spent his first time in detention helping other inmates search asylum claims and habeas corpus. .
Ali was re-taken into custody through ICE 20 days after being released with a mandatory registration with the agency, but was released in May 2007 after ICE did not download the Pakistani government’s mandatory travel documents to deport him. habeas corpus request alleging unlawful detention.
After four years out of detention, Ali was arrested again via ICE on some other recording in July 2011. The firm said in an opinion that it had verified Ali’s Pakistani nationality and had decided that there was a “significant probability” that it could only deport him. Ali filed another habeas corpus petition and was released six months after ICE returned without being able to deport him.
Pakistan is lately one of 10 countries that ICE considers “recalcitrant” because they do not cooperate fully in the repatriation of its citizens. The Zadvydas Supreme Court ruling against Davis in 2001 sometimes calls for ICE to free immigrants from civilian immigration. detention after six months if there is “no significant likelihood of expulsion in the fairly foreseeable future. “
After the end of his third era of detention, Ali continued to sign with ICE for the next 8 years. Meanwhile, he met Alavi and the two married in New York in July 2018. They moved to California with 6-year-old Orlando. abbas, born in May 2019.
During a regime registration with ICE in July, Ali was re-taken into custody and detained at the ICE Advance Treatment Center, home to the largest COVID-19 outbreak in the US immigrant detention system. Before being moved to the Arizona facility where you are located. lately in.
“After exhausting all formal legal proceedings, Ali is detained through ICE pending his final removal,” ICE said in a statement.
Alavi said she became involved in her husband’s health, noting the number of coronavirus cases among ICE prisoners. “I paint at THE ICO COVID, so I know how bad they are in health,” he said. “It’s terrible to see them and now to know that I can’t do anything for my husband is just annoying. “
Throughout the pandemic, ICE defended its strategy to curb the spread of coronavirus within its detention system, which has recently housed 20,000 immigrants, and highlighted efforts to control immigrants, screen new inmates and isolate those exposed to the virus, while noting that its criminal population has declined since March.
Last week, however, Judge Jesús Bernal of the U. S. District Court in Los Angeles said ICE’s compliance with court needs to protect vulnerable COVID-19 “weak” and “irregular” detainees. He also criticized ICE for not releasing more inmates whose age and medical situations put them at increased risk of serious illness or death if they contract COVID-19.
Bernal said ICE “liberated” 1,909 vulnerable inmates, but continued to hold more than 3,800. Among those “liberated” were 769 immigrants who were deported, 74 who were granted a deportation exemption and 3 who died.
Ali said ICE deserves to take into account his circle of family ties, blank registration and periods of detention and allow him to remain in the United States so that he can reopen his immigration case and seek to legalize his prestige through his marriage to Alavi. “They deserve to exercise favorable discretion over other people like us,” he said.
Alavi said she was a liar emotionally and physically, as she found it difficult to care for Abbas and Orlando alone, while taking easy turns in the hospital. If Ali is deported, Alavi said she didn’t know what she was going to do, and pointed out that Orlando didn’t have a passport to go outside the country.
In a message, Alavi made a direct call to ICE: “Don’t tear us apart. “
“In these difficult times, it is very important that families are together,” Alavi wrote. “ICE can honor a lifeguard who is a law-abiding U. S. citizen and free Amir. “