Christina Goldbaum

But the building in Batavia, New York, was a federal detention center run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the hungry workers were mostly ICE employees.

Within hours, the small business, which serves “Tricked Out Nachos” and an “El Camino Bowl,” was plunged into the crosshairs of the rancorous national debate over immigration.

Lloyd, which operates four taco trucks in the area, was hit with a barrage of criticism from immigration advocates and left-leaning Buffalo residents, who accused the small business of collaborating with ICE.

That the cuisine was Mexican, the nationality of many of the people subject to stricter immigration policies under President Donald Trump, seemed like additional insult.

The company’s owners quickly apologized for agreeing to station a truck outside the detention center, only to find themselves apologizing again shortly after, this time for offending law enforcement.

“We serve all communities, we go to all neighborhoods, we are not political. Why would we be?” one of Lloyd’s owners, Pete Cimino, said at a news conference Monday. “How can any business choose sides in our politically divided country and ever hope to succeed?”

He added: “We make tacos — not war.”

The owners did not respond to requests for an interview from The New York Times.

The controversy has stoked divisions in Buffalo, a city that is home to many refugees and immigrants in a largely conservative stretch of upstate New York, and has shown how even small local companies can be lashed by escalating tensions over national policy.

The company first apologized Thursday for a “lapse in judgment” in sending a truck to the detention center on the previous day and then promised to evaluate all future locations and events to ensure they aligned with its values. Lloyd also pledged to donate the lunch profits to a local immigration advocacy organization.

But that apology sparked a new backlash, as some residents took offense at what they saw as Lloyd’s stance against ICE and the values they believe law enforcement agencies espouse.

“In what world does a company feel the need to apologize for serving food to federal law enforcement officers who work in dangerous conditions?” Rob Ortt, a Republican state senator and congressional candidate, said on Twitter. “The men and women who work to enforce our immigration laws and protect us deserve better.”

On Monday, Cimino said his company, which has around 130 employees, does not have a position on federal immigration policies.

But just by appearing to take sides in the immigration debate, the company has already taken a hit: Cimino said three prearranged visits by a Lloyd food truck were canceled in the last week and its Facebook page had received more than 5,000 heated comments.

“Honestly, we were not prepared for the anger directed at us, it was surprising, and demoralizing,” Cimino said.

Since the Trump administration began implementing its immigration policies, the pressure on companies to reject any link to ICE has grown — often with success.

Six airlines in the United States said they would not work with the federal government to transport children who were separated from their parents by ICE. Hundreds of employees at companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte Consulting have petitioned their organizations to end their contracts with ICE.

Over the summer, in anticipation of mass ICE raids, several hotel chains, including Marriott International, said they would not allow agents to use their rooms to house detained immigrants, as the agency has done when there is no space in detention facilities.

Small businesses like Lloyd, which cannot usually offer significant support or services to federal agencies, are typically insulated from such pressure.

“It’s a shame when small entrepreneurs get embroiled in something they are not giving a lot of thought to, when the big companies — Google, Facebook, drug companies — are always involved in this stuff,” said Susan McCartney, director of the Small Business Development Center at SUNY Buffalo State.

Still, the pushback could begin to reach a larger swath of companies that work with ICE.

“There is no aspect of immigration detention that can survive without for-profit businesses,” said Jennifer Connor, executive director of Justice for Migrant Families of Western New York, an advocacy organization in Buffalo. “I think businesses have to decide what their values are and what kinds of stands they are going to take. There is no not-political stance.”

This article originally appeared in

A Taco Truck Served Lunch to ICE Workers. Then Came the Backlash.

It seemed like a standard request for the Lloyd taco truck, a local favorite in Buffalo. Last week, a building on the outskirts of the city asked the truck to park outside around midday so its employees could have Mexican food for lunch.

Then in July, it surfaced across lakes in the Pacific Northwest and along the entire Mississippi seacoast, forcing the closure of the state’s beaches.

Now, the green-blue blooms of toxic algae have been found in lakes and ponds in three New York City parks, leading environmental officials to warn residents to keep pets and young children away from the affected water until the blooms clear.

The blooms contain cyanobacteria, single-celled organisms that can produce toxic substances when grown densely. The growth of the bacteria is fueled by warm, sunny days and nutrients from nearby surfaces that can wash into lakes and ponds during intense rainstorms.

In Manhattan, the toxic algae has been found in Turtle Pond and Harlem Meer in Central Park and in the pond in Morningside Park. Officials also found suspicious blooms in The Lake in Central Park earlier this summer, according to the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation website.

In Brooklyn, the toxic blooms have been detected in one part of the large pond in Prospect Park. The dedicated swimming area for dogs, the Prospect Park Dog Beach, remains open.

“It is important to try to avoid contact with any algae,” Meghan Lalor, a spokeswoman from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, said in a statement. “Keep pets on leashes and do not allow them to enter or drink from lakes and ponds, unless in areas specifically designated for such activities.”

The bacteria can cause skin rashes and neurological problems in animals and can release toxins that can cause liver damage and respiratory paralysis. Dogs can collapse or die suddenly after swallowing contaminated water while swimming or licking toxic algae from their fur, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Presence of cyanobacteria was detected during routine testing this month by the environmental conservation and city parks departments. As part of their biweekly sampling of suspicious sites, city officials will test sites Monday to determine if the toxins are still present and if any additional toxic blooms have grown.

Urban areas are particularly susceptible to the algae growth because of the variety of nutrients found on nearby roads, sidewalks and sewage pipes, as well as the relatively shallow lakes and ponds, which allow nutrients to mix more easily.

Although small blooms of the toxic algae have been consistently found in New York state lakes and ponds in recent years, scientists have said the intensity of recent rainfall, which has been linked to climate change, may be contributing to this year’s blooms.

“There is a relationship between a changing climate and increased intensity of storms,” said Marit Larson, chief of natural resources at the city Department of Parks and Recreation.

“Generally, in the last few years, we are seeing it occur in lakes around the city,” Larson added. “And because it’s something we know could become worse in the future, we are paying more attention to it.”

City park officials, for example, now sample suspicious algae growth for potential toxins at least every two weeks. The blooms will likely dissipate on their own when the chemical balance in the water is restored, officials said.

Until then, residents are advised to avoid contact with affected water, and to immediately wash skin that comes into contact with algae.

In June, New Jersey state officials discovered the toxic algae in Lake Hopatcong, forcing a swimming ban at the large lake that is usually bustling with activity in the summer. The discovery has sparked a heated debate among New Jersey politicians about how best to tackle the issue of toxic algae, including whether towns should charge property owners fees based on how much stormwater they produce.

Dog owners have been on particularly high alert for the toxic algae since one woman in North Carolina reported the death of her three dogs after they swam in a pond.

On Sunday in Prospect Park, newly erected yellow signs warned, “Harmful algal blooms have been found in this water.”

But not every parkgoer was aware of the threat.

“I just had my dog on a walk right near the water,” said Marcin Nasuro, 24, who was with his poodle, Ted. “I wouldn’t come near the lake if I knew it was toxic. A dog’s like a kid. It’s like a part of your family.”

Toward the opposite end of the pond, away from the algae outgrowth, paddle boats continued to operate and parkgoers appeared less concerned.

“Well, I’m hoping we’ll just get on the boat, and get in the water, and it’ll be fine,” said Bethany Erskine, 41, as she waited in line for a paddle boat with her husband and three children.

“We’ve been canoeing in the Gowanus Canal, so we’re possibly not the best judges.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/nyregion/toxic-algae-nyc-parks.html" id="e216c2bd-de09-3d3e-a542-d3851be1c716">The New York Times</a>.

Toxic Algae, Potentially Fatal for Dogs, Blooms in Water of 3 New York City Parks

NEW YORK — The green sludge appeared in New Jersey’s largest lake in June, ruining a usually bustling season of lakeside leisure.

When she first arrived at Boylan Street Recreation Center last Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., the line wrapped around the block; Goodluck and others were told to come back at 1 p.m. At 1 p.m., she was instructed to come back two hours later. Uncertain she could find a neighbor to watch the six children she babysits, she gave up.

“Two free cases to do everything — to drink, to cook. It won’t last me that long, but it’s not cheap for me to keep buying water myself,” said Goodluck, 52.

On Goodluck’s stretch of Norwood Street in the city’s West Ward section, residents say the water crisis now gripping Newark began long before officials agreed to distribute free bottled water last week. The city’s stopgap measure was taken in response to a scathing letter from the EPA released Aug. 9, which found dangerously high lead levels in sections of the city’s water supply.

It was Newark’s strongest acknowledgment yet of the public health emergency, which predominantly affects the city’s poor and black residents, like those in the West Ward.

One recent evening, this corner of the neighborhood was buzzing with life: Children zoomed up and down the sidewalks of Norwood Street on brightly colored bicycles. Parents, cousins and neighbors sat on the wooden stoops of their multifamily homes, chatting.

But amid the usual bustle were subtle signs of the entrenched problem: Half-full water bottles hung from residents’ back pockets and sat wedged between the spokes of children’s bicycles. The plastic wrap from water cases purchased almost weekly spilled from garbage cans outside nearly every home.

“I only drink the bottled water,” said Thomasine Smith, 73, who relies on her niece to drive her to the store to pick up bottled water every two weeks. “The tap water’s been tasting funny for years.”

Opposite her front door is a constant reminder of the lead problems that have plagued Newark for years. There, a newly built two-family home is identifiable by a metal placard that hangs from its red brick exterior and reads, “CITY OF NEWARK LEAD SAFE HOUSE.”

A week before the EPA’s letter was released, Alika Speight, 38, and her three children moved into the apartment on the second floor of the house. It is one of a handful of homes the city opened a decade ago to temporarily house families whose children showed high levels of lead in blood tests while city workers scrubbed their homes of lead.

Roughly a year ago, at his annual checkup, Speight’s 3-year-old son, Kion, showed elevated levels of lead in his blood. The city agreed to remediate her house.

Finding excess lead in Kion’s blood was jarring, she said. Ever since, she has tried to instill new habits in her children. No baths, just fast showers. No food if it is made with tap water. No drinking water unless it comes from a bottle.

But Speight’s estimate of the number of bottles required to cook and drink far exceeds the two free cases each home can receive from the city every two weeks.

“I’ve been buying 10 to 15 cases for the house every two weeks,” said Speight, who works as a window clerk in a post office in Trenton, New Jersey. “Plus I have to drop off a case or two with their babysitter —”

“She makes us drink the faucet water; she doesn’t give us the bottles!” her 9-year-old daughter, Sanai, said, interrupting.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Speight said, burying her forehead in her hand. “I tell them not to drink it, but they’re kids.”

For years before Mayor Ras J. Baraka acknowledged the worrisome lead levels, officials knew the city was at a higher risk than most for lead contamination.

In 2009, the city estimated that the rate of children affected by lead poisoning in Newark was three times higher than it was in New Jersey and the rest of the United States, a trend officials attributed to the city’s industrial past and old housing stock.

Then in 2016, the city shut off drinking fountains in 30 schools because it found elevated lead levels in the water. Last fall, as concern spread that lead was also leaching into the tap water in people’s homes, city officials said they would hand out 40,000 water filters.

Despite repeated assurances by city officials, the EPA found the water filters the city provided may not be doing enough to protect its residents’ health.

“At this point I don’t trust this administration at all,” said Rasheeda Scott, 34, on a recent afternoon as she fingered a cigarette on her stoop. “They’ve just denied, denied, denied there was any problem — but look now.”

Scott has bought bottled water for years. The tap water tasted strange, almost milky, she said. “To think we could be like Flint, and we’re such a big city, it’s terrifying,” she added.

The West Ward was one of the areas most directly affected by lead contamination. Not only is it fed by the Pequannock Water Treatment Plant, where some of the issues originated, but the neighborhood’s many older houses have lead plumbing.

City officials have said residents living in these older houses need to rely on bottled water.

“The only thing we can do is buy water,” said Ralph Wright, 82, a retired taxi driver. “I mean I’ve got taxes, water bills, insurances, heating bills. I can’t afford to replace my pipes, too.”

Wright lives in one of the older multifamily homes encased in rotting wooden slats; it sits across from a row of newer, washed-brick townhouses.

The differences in their exteriors speak as much to the residents’ uneven struggle to lurch out of poverty as it does to the economic inequality inherent in the current crisis.

Those in decaying homes tend to be lifelong residents, most of whom cannot afford to rent elsewhere, much less replace their pipes or buy enough bottles of water to cook, clean and drink. Those in the newer houses are mostly younger transplants with steady incomes, who may not need to buy bottled water but can afford to purchase it anyway.

Helping to bridge that divide is a concern all residents seem to share: drugs and crime. Here, many parents work diligently to shield their children from the violence that plays out on streets and in school hallways, which they fear could derail their children’s futures.

Now, they worry, the lead may have been doing that all along, clutching their children in an intractable cycle of poverty.

“All the urban problems you can imagine are happening here — shootings, everything,” said Domonique Berfet, 26, who is raising a 5-year-old son down the street.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/nyregion/newark-water-crisis.html" id="e5fefac2-aead-34b5-ac27-cef9ae0bc18e">The New York Times</a>.

Newark Neighborhood Fears Crime, Poverty and Now, Lead

NEWARK, N.J. — Donnette Goodluck tried all day to pick up the free bottled water the city was distributing as officials addressed a growing lead contamination crisis.

But that rejuvenating bounce for cities such as Utica, Buffalo and Syracuse ended after the Trump administration drastically cut the number of refugees allowed into the country. New York received 1,281 refugees in the last fiscal year, compared with 5,026 just two years before, according to the State Department. Officials in those cities worried they had lost a small but important bulwark against population decline.

Now, some are testing out a new strategy: luring refugees who have settled in other parts of the United States to move to New York. They are advertising job placement, English language and housing services, hoping to draw enough people to offset the shortfall.

New York is not alone in trying novel ways to reverse its dwindling population. Maine, for example, has offered an outstretched hand to refugees in hope of expanding its workforce. Vermont has dangled $10,000 grants to entice people to move to the state and work from home, in a bid to attract young tech workers. And Wyoming is trying to woo people born there back home by deploying recruiters to help them find jobs.

But as the pool of refugees shrinks under Trump, New York has positioned itself to have an advantage over other places. Cuts in federal funding meant resettlement agencies in other parts of the country had to shrink or close. In New York, the state stepped in and has been funding those agencies since 2017. They now can provide services to more refugees, an incentive for people to move to New York from elsewhere.

“If the message gets out that we have job opportunities, and it’s a great place to raise a family, that’s what we want,” said Anthony Picente, the Oneida County executive, a Republican whose county includes Utica. “That is the message we are moving out there.”

Though Picente believes in cracking down on illegal immigration, he and other state officials are concerned that curtailing legal avenues for immigrants could harm small American cities.

“Why are we capping the legal point of entry unless we can’t handle them, and no one is saying we can’t handle them?” Picente said.

While asylum-seekers arrive on their own and then make a case for protection, refugees are vetted by the United Nations, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department while they are overseas. Those agencies then determine if a person will be granted the right to come to the United States.

Since assuming office, Trump has sharply reduced the number of refugees. The cap was set at 30,000 this fiscal year, down from 110,000 in the last fiscal year of the Obama administration. It is the lowest ceiling a president has ever placed on refugee admissions.

In an era when immigration policy has drawn sharp political lines throughout the country, enticing refugees to New York has held bipartisan local appeal.

“The real fear for upstate cities is that if we don’t keep our population growing, we will fall into an endless cycle of decline,” said Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo. “We’re not at that tipping point yet, but we are very close.”

Between 1950 and 2000, Rochester and Syracuse lost roughly 30% of their populations, Utica lost about 40% of inhabitants and Buffalo lost half its residents, according to the New York state comptroller’s office. Buffalo’s decline was the fourth highest nationwide.

But as refugees moved into abandoned homes and leased empty storefronts, deserted neighborhoods in these cities started to transform — although these towns have not seen enough growth to reach population numbers of nearly 70 years ago.

Today, Buffalo’s Grant Street, which was once near vacant, bustles with supermarkets and craft stores that serve many of the immigrants who have moved into the surrounding neighborhood. The street’s West Side Bazaar, a popular lunch and shopping spot, is filled with vendors who sell hand-woven tapestries and beaded jewelry, while the smell of Ethiopian spices and Malaysian ramen from its food court waft through the room.

Across town on the East Side — notorious 30 years ago for its crime — a Bengali community helped turn apartments that had housed brothels into community-oriented spaces.

“There were shootings, there were prostitutes, we used to see maybe 200 cars coming by at night for people to buy drugs,” said Atiqur Rahman, 56, a refugee from Bangladesh who was one of the first in his community to move to the East Side of Buffalo in 2006. “But where most people saw abandoned houses and crime, I thought, ‘The houses are cheap, I can move in, put a light outside my front door, be nice to my neighbors and make a good future.’”

For the last five years, Rahman has run his own hardware business and accounting firm on the neighborhood’s main drag, Broadway Street, where other immigrants like him have also started their own businesses.

Some refugees have become new recruits for New York firms hungry for employees.

“We couldn't grow as a business without them because we would be scrambling to find staff,” said Larry Christ, chief operating officer at Litelab Corp., a lighting manufacturer in Buffalo, where about a third of the workforce are immigrants, including recently arrived refugees.

The effort to draw more people to New York includes an advertising campaign targeted toward the Facebook groups, WhatsApp chats and newspapers that are run by refugees, whom officials hope will spread the word in their communities. One resettlement agency, the International Institute of Buffalo, created a recruitment video that features picturesque rows of houses dotted with fall foliage and residents boasting about the city.

In trying to draw upon the existing pool of refugees in the United States, New York is competing against places that have experienced similar declines as the country’s population growth has fallen to 80-year lows. Between 2007 and 2017, 80% of American counties, with a combined population of 149 million Americans, lost prime working-age adults, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank.

Even without a coordinated recruitment campaign, New York’s upstate cities have benefited from chatter among refugee communities. In Utica, about 80 to 100 refugees who had been living in other parts of the country have arrived annually in recent years, said Shelly Callahan, executive director of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees in Utica.

Abdiwahab Awayle, 36, first moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2017 from a refugee camp in Kenya. But after three months he stopped receiving government help to learn English and find a job.

Struggling to make ends meet while working at a plastic production company, he decided to move with his wife and five children to Utica, where he heard from Somali friends that rents were lower and better paying manufacturing jobs were available. The center for refugees, they said, offered free English classes.

“I make more money now. I can take better care of my family, and now I am telling my friends in Pennsylvania they need to come here,” said Awayle, who works in a retail store outside the city.

Only 229 refugees were resettled in Utica in 2017, about half the number of refugees resettled the previous year.

Joe Carubba, the regional vice president of Gerber Collision &amp; Glass, a body shop chain, said his company had not been able to fill 40 jobs for auto body technicians. He oversees 18 shops but plans to expand to 50 locations across the state.

“Now when we look at adding a new location, our biggest consideration is — can we find the people to fill the jobs?” Carubba said. “The answer is often no.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/nyregion/refugees-upstate-ny-employment.html" id="bb7fc31a-78ef-31ce-ad83-0b109a1335d6">The New York Times</a>.

Luring Refugees: NY Cities Desperate for People Try a New Strategy

UTICA, N.Y. — Over the last few decades, as a manufacturing decline left homes vacant and storefronts dark, New York’s upstate cities opened their doors to refugees. The influx, while modest, gave new life to neighborhoods, helped alleviate labor shortages and shored up city budgets.

By the end of the confrontation, his face was bloody and bruised. But neither Sihotang nor another immigrant in the officers’ custody who watched the incident unfold was allowed onto the plane after the pilot raised security concerns.

“I kept trying to explain to them that the conditions in my country are very bad now,” Sihotang said. “I was telling them, ‘I don’t want to die there.’”

Sihotang had lost his fight to receive asylum in the United States a decade ago, a decision he did not appeal after he and thousands like him were granted a temporary reprieve from deportation by the Obama administration. Days after assuming office, President Donald Trump revoked that protection, making Sihotang and thousands of other asylum-seekers suddenly eligible for deportation, though many did not realize it.

Even as Trump has sought in recent days to limit who can apply for asylum, and to expand indefinite detention for asylum-seekers, his administration has with little public notice been carrying out a crackdown on people who asked for asylum, did not receive it and remained in the United States.

The policy, which often involves seeking out immigrants who have been in the country for years in a legal gray area, shows how the Trump administration aims to reverse what it believes are the misguided policies of the Obama administration.

Immigration agents have been especially active in New York City. Deportations of immigrants with no criminal convictions, including asylum-seekers with years- or decades-old deportation orders, rose to 1,144 in the 2018 federal fiscal year from 313 in 2016, a 266% increase, according to a recent report from the city comptroller.

That is the largest percentage increase of any Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in the country.

The Trump administration said ICE agents are following the law in trying to return asylum-seekers who have lost their cases on the merits and have no right to remain in the country.

But as these people are caught in a deportation dragnet, they risk being sent to countries where the persecution threats they face are even greater than when they fled to the United States, asylum-seekers and lawyers say.

In the final years of the Obama administration, immigration judges were instructed to use prosecutorial discretion to grant some immigrants in the country illegally, such as asylum-seekers who had lost their cases, the ability to stay and work in the United States legally as long as they regularly checked in with ICE.

These enforcement policies were designed to focus ICE’s limited resources on deporting immigrants in the country illegally who had criminal convictions, recently crossed the border or posed a threat to national security.

Until Trump came into office, asylum-seekers like Sihotang “had no reason to try to reopen their asylum case because they were permitted to stay and work in this country,” said Amber Gracia, an immigration lawyer in Texas. “When the government suddenly seeks removal, these people are caught off guard.”

She questioned why agents were focusing on deporting immigrants who had not broken the law, rather than focusing on violent criminals in the country illegally.

ICE officials said that as long as there was a standing deportation order for a person, there would be legal grounds to take that person into custody.

“The U.S. government provides all those in removal proceedings with an opportunity to apply and be considered for relief from removal,” an ICE spokeswoman, Rachael Yong Yow, said in a statement. “If an immigration judge finds an individual ineligible for any form of relief, the judge will issue a final order of removal, which ICE carries out in accordance with applicable U.S. law.”

She said she could not comment on specific cases.

After losing his original asylum case five years ago, Sihotang lived and worked legally in New York City and watched as the persecution of Christians like him intensified in Indonesia.

When he arrived for his biannual check-in with ICE — a condition of his reprieve — in summer 2017, he said he had thought that it would proceed like every other: He would update his home address, provide his work address and confirm that he had not been arrested or convicted of a crime.

But this time, the ICE officer asked him to renew his passport and return to the ICE office. When he returned with the new passport, ICE took him into custody.

Only when ICE drove him to Kennedy Airport four weeks later did Sihotang realize why the ICE officer had requested that he renew his passport: The plan was to put him on a commercial flight to Indonesia.

“I was shocked,” Sihotang said. “I was thinking about my kids. I told them, ‘I’ve got four kids and my family. How will they survive without me?’”

Months after the confrontation at the boarding gate in 2018, ICE again tried to deport Sihotang. But this time, as he sat in a van minutes away from the airport, an ICE officer received a call telling him to stop the deportation.

A judge had determined Sihotang faced credible fears of persecution in Indonesia and reopened his asylum case, which remains unresolved.

The asylum-seeker who watched Sihotang’s first airport confrontation requested that he be identified only by his nickname, Neo, and that his home country not be named for fear of persecution. He was deported from New York weeks after that encounter, despite last-minute attempts to reopen his asylum case.

“I didn’t do anything criminal,” Neo said, breaking into tears. “I didn’t do anything wrong, then suddenly they just sent me back.”

One aspect of Neo’s asylum case, he and his lawyer said, was a medical condition he had developed for which he needed daily medication unavailable in his home country. When he boarded his deportation flight to East Asia, he said he had three weeks’ worth of the medication left. So, he said, he started to ration it: Take one pill. Skip a day. Take another.

“I was worried I was going to die,” he said.

His only hope was his lawyer in the United States, who had filed an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest immigration court in the country. The board determines whether an asylum-seeker’s claim has new merits and can issue an order preventing ICE from deporting an immigrant while that decision is made.

Since Trump came into office, more immigrants are making requests to the board to temporarily prevent a deportation.

But the denial rate for those requests has sharply increased, according to analysis by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Steven Stafford, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said judges on the board “apply the law to the facts of the case before them.”

When the board grants these requests, it is often only hours before an immigrant is scheduled to board a deportation flight, lawyers say. Some asylum-seekers have even had their cases reopened after they have been deported.

In spring 2018, Neo was brought back to the United States by ICE after the board agreed to reopen his asylum case.

Immigration lawyers pointed to the circumstances of a Bangladeshi man who requested that he be identified only by his given name, Mahbub, because of an unresolved asylum case. He was granted permission to stay in the United States until the board reconsidered his case. He had sought asylum on the grounds that he was being persecuted over his political affiliation.

But the panel’s decision, which arrived in his lawyer’s inbox at 9 a.m., came four hours too late: At 5 a.m., he had been put on a flight to Bangladesh.

When he arrived in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, he said he called his mother who, distraught, told him that he could not come to their home. One of his friends in the opposition party, in which Mahbub was an activist, had been arrested in the months before his return.

Fearing he faced the same fate, Mahbub, 36, said that he went into hiding. Months later, he paid a smuggler to help make his way to France, where he sought asylum.

“I’m just happy I stayed alive,” Mahbub said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/nyregion/asylum-seekers-deportation.html" id="e09ed1b4-29cc-3f0b-ab4b-8c53d8a0ad81">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Indra Sihotang was desperate to stay in the United States. Minutes from being deported to Indonesia, the 52-year-old father clung to a chair bolted to the floor at Kennedy International Airport, struggling against four immigration officers trying to tear him away.

'I Don't Want to Die': Asylum Seekers, Once in Limbo, Face Deportation Under Trump

Abdulwahab has crossed into Yemen territory controlled by various factions: al-Qaida, Houthi rebels and the government, all to get his wife, mother and young daughter out of the country and into the United States. An American citizen, Abdulwahab described the weekslong journey as the most terrifying travel of his life.

But now he’s up against one final obstacle: the U.S. State Department.

Abdulwahab, 32, is one of hundreds of Yemeni-Americans in New York who were separated from non-U.S. citizen spouses or children after the Trump administration’s travel ban, which severely restricts entry into the United States by people from seven countries, five of them Muslim-majority.

Some, like Abdulwahab’s wife, Aisha Mahyoub, 30, were approved for a visa only to have it revoked once the ban went into effect. Such an action violated the terms of the ban, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy organization based in New York. Three other Yemeni-Americans are involved in the case, which follows a similar class-action suit filed in September on behalf of more than 100 others.

(The New York Times was able to verify much of Abdulwahab’s story, though parts of his family’s travel within Yemen cannot be independently verified.)

For many Yemeni-Americans, like Abdulwahab, the cost of supporting family members in countries like Djibouti, home to the nearest U.S. Consulate, has been crippling.

In July, one Yemeni-American man committed suicide in Louisiana after succumbing to the economic strain of supporting his wife and five children after they were denied visas in Djibouti — located across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa — where rent can be six times as much as in Yemen.

Abdulwahab estimates the process of getting family members out of Yemen has cost him $40,000. To care for his wife in Djibouti, he pays $1,500 a month for rent (such a high cost because the city caters to the foreign community), $400 for electricity, $300 for food and $200 to a woman who sometimes lends Mahyoub a hand.

In New York, he pitches in $700 for rent at his brother’s apartment, pays $500 for his own shared apartment and sends whatever money remains to relatives in Yemen, where goods have become prohibitively expensive — and children are starving as a result.

The expenses mostly exhaust the $3,500-$4,000 on average he earns per month as an Uber driver in New York City.

“I don’t know what else to do,” said Abdulwahab, his watery brown eyes framed in thin-rimmed, rectangular glasses. “I can’t bring her here, I can’t bring her back to Yemen. I just keep hoping that one day it will be over and we will be together.”

A soft-spoken man, Abdulwahab lives in a one-bedroom apartment he shares with two roommates in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Every morning, he wakes up at 3:30 a.m., showers, dresses and checks his wife’s status on the consulate website. He also checks the pictures of her on his phone — her delicate cheekbones and perfectly pink lips simultaneously at his fingertips and 7,000 miles away.

Abdulwahab was born in Yemen. Because his father is an American citizen and lived in New York, Abdulwahab moved to the United States in 2006 and was eventually granted U.S. citizenship. He frequently traveled between the United States and Yemen, often spending time with his sister’s friend, who would become his future wife.

The couple finally married eight years ago in a wedding hall in Hodeida, Yemen’s main port city and her hometown.

When Abdulwahab left later that year to go back to the United States, he planned to complete a certificate program in Queens, get a job and then apply for his new bride to join him in America. In the meantime, Mahyoub settled in with her in-laws in Taiz, waiting patiently for years as Abdulwahab came and left, and their first daughter, Areg, was born.

But when the war between Houthi rebels and government forces broke out in early 2015, the security in Taiz deteriorated. The changes came slowly at first: A few airstrikes hit the town. Houthi rebels set up checkpoints. Then one night, airstrikes rained down, destroying apartment buildings just blocks from Mahyoub’s home.

“We were very afraid, it was like death was staring at us,” she said in a phone interview from Djibouti.

As the strikes briefly subsided, Mahyoub and her parents-in-law went to Abdulwahab’s grandfather’s house in the mountains. There Mahyoub finally called her husband for the first time in several days.

Abdulwahab panicked. They could not wait, he thought.

The application process took two years, but in 2017 Abdulwahab was notified that his mother, wife and daughter were scheduled for an interview at the U.S. Consulate in Djibouti, the final step of the visa application process. With commercial flights to Aden temporarily suspended because of the fighting, Abdulwahab booked a flight to Oman and made his way by bus and taxi to his family in Taiz, traversing al-Qaida-controlled land and then into government territory.

By the time they all reached Djibouti, he thought the worst was behind them. His mother, Areg and his wife, now pregnant with their second child, completed their interviews in October 2017. Mahyoub was issued a document that stated that she had been approved for a visa and just needed to wait for it to be printed.

Areg and Abdulwahab’s mother, Saoud Khaled, 70, were issued their travel documents within nine days, but Mahyoub received nothing. Finally, in February 2018, she was told that her visa approval was being overturned because of the travel ban.

“I never even dreamed they would approve Areg and not me,” Mahyoub said. “How was I supposed to be left behind?”

Now Areg and her grandmother live a block away from Abdulwahab with his brother, his brother’s wife and their five children. There is more space in their apartment, more cousins around to help care for Areg, now 4 years old, but she still yearns to be with her father.

One recent afternoon, Areg sensed that her father was preparing to leave the apartment. She jumped into his lap, tiny tears trickling down her cheeks.

Abdulwahab relented and, taking her hand, led her to Yemen Cafe, a few blocks down the road on Fifth Avenue. At the cafe, Areg asked where her mother was. Abdulwahab never knows how to respond. Squirming in the corner booth, she was blissfully unaware that her mother was in Djibouti and that her father was spending every dollar he had to care for her there.

“Now I can’t save money, whatever I earn I spend on my family,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t handle it, how can I handle it? It is too much.”

Abdulwahab calls his wife every morning from his car, the sound of her soft voice cutting in and out over Djibouti’s unreliable network. As they talk, the unspoken questions hangs in the air: Will they ever be reunited in America?

“Inshallah,” he says. God willing.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/nyregion/uber-driver-yemen-wife-trump.html" id="8d23427e-2985-3405-ad5c-9d75b7e23284">The New York Times</a>.

For a Yemeni in NYC, the Agony of Who's Been Left Behind

NEW YORK — Ahmed Abdulwahab’s family has survived airstrikes and firefights. They endured daylong drives across crumbled roads and on mountain ledges so steep it felt as if gravity would surely bring them tumbling down.

The lawyers said they were turning to more liberal state courts to challenge the Trump administration’s policies in part because they believed that they would be less likely to succeed in a federal judiciary that is growing more conservative — and might ultimately lose in a Supreme Court with two appointees of President Donald Trump.

Lawyers have also been encouraged by a series of recent successes in state law cases, which they say represent a long overdue reconciling between a deportation system that relies on local law enforcement and the state laws that determine the authority of local law enforcement.

Last month, New York became the second state in which an appellate state court ruled that local law enforcement officers could not detain immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which then typically puts them into the deportation system.

The ruling follows a similar decision in the highest court of Massachusetts and lower courts in Colorado and Minnesota, all of which have prohibited local law enforcement officers from complying with so-called detainers, the requests from ICE for those officers to hold immigrants.

The immigration agency typically asks local jails and local police forces to detain noncitizens who have been arrested, often on less serious charges, and will eventually be released.

The four state courts ruled that if law enforcement officers detained immigrants on behalf of ICE, that was considered a new arrest, which they did not have the authority to make under their respective state laws.

But unlike the courts in previous decisions, New York’s three-judge appellate court was the first to meticulously review and reject each of the federal government’s claims in its final opinion. As a result, lawyers across the country now view the opinion itself like a blueprint for crafting litigation in their own states and consider the lawyers who brought the case battle-tested veterans whose legal strategies they can employ.

Though a handful of states like Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Alabama have passed laws banning sanctuary jurisdictions, where state legislators have not specifically targeted sanctuaries, advocates believe state laws and constitutions will generally favor the authority of the state to determine how its local law enforcement interacts with federal immigration authorities.

“I expect that attorneys will be relying more and more on state law and asking state courts to step up and assume a role as the first-line defenders of civil liberties,” said Mark Silverstein, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Colorado who litigated a state law case against detainers.

Despite Trump’s conservative imprint across the federal judiciary, state courts retain the independence to protect civil liberties under their state constitutions, Silverstein added.

Sanctuary jurisdictions restrict cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities by denying ICE access to jails or not complying with ICE’s detainer requests. Lawyers for immigrants have successfully defended these sanctuary cities’ and states’ sovereignty in federal courts since the early years of the Obama administration, and there are now hundreds of such jurisdictions across the country.

For the Trump administration, these jurisdictions’ ability to sever the ties between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement will determine whether or not Trump can achieve his immigration agenda within the United States.

Though Trump has sharply widened the pool of immigrants that ICE can deport, to actually locate them ICE relies on information from local law enforcement about when they happen to arrest such immigrants and their cooperation in detaining those immigrants for ICE.

The battles between so-called sanctuary cities and the Trump administration are increasingly moving to state courts, where lawyers for immigrants have started to convince judges that state laws prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration agents.

Christina Goldbaum

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