F
Fred Goodwin, CMA
Guest
Breaching America: 'I've made it to America'
<http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/
MYSA052307.1A.SIA.PartIV.3bafbdd.html>
http://tinyurl.com/3arzlj
Web Posted: 05/23/2007 02:12 AM CDT
Todd Bensman, Express-News
Last part of a four-part series
BROWNSVILLE - The human smuggler offering to help Aamr Bahnan Boles
and his two friends cross the border into America was tall, dark and
pricey.
"I can get you to Texas, no problem," he told them. "For a thousand
dollars each."
Boles and the others had just walked out of the detention center for
immigrants in Mexico City. The guards, knowing the three were about to
be freed after three months in custody, had arranged the rendezvous
with a smuggler.
Boles would recall later how the smuggler - in street parlance a
coyote, or someone who makes a living helping undocumented immigrants
cross the border - was leaning against a tractor-trailer rig outside
the jail gates.
He said his name was Antonio.
"Where are you from and where do you want to go?" the smuggler asked.
"We are Iraqis," Boles said in halting Spanish, "and we want to go to
America."
Boles, a Chaldean Christian determined to escape the Iraq war, is
categorized by the U.S. government as a "special-interest alien,"
those from 43 countries where terror groups are known to operate. As
such, they can be subjected to extra screening and harsher treatment
than other immigrants when caught crossing illegally.
Near the end of his journey to America - born in the shadows of a
Damascus, Syria, restaurant and culminating nearly a year later with
the final push into Texas - Boles ran smack into this post-9-11
security net.
But the system is fallible, and just as likely to punish the
benevolent as to release the dangerous.
On the U.S. side, authorities are feeling their way sometimes blind
and scared. Once over the Texas border, Boles would encounter various
jail cells, a skeptical magistrate, a distrusting government lawyer
and a bizarre courtroom quiz about his biblical knowledge where his
very freedom hinged on the right answers.
Boles managed to cling to his last couple thousand dollars after
Mexican immigration agents plucked him off a bus from Guatemala, where
he had arrived eight months earlier after an air trip from Damascus to
Moscow and through Cuba. His new traveling companions, Ammar Habib
Zaya and Remon Manssor Piuz, also had money.
Zaya and Piuz, like Boles and many Iraqis caught traveling through
Mexico, said they were members of a Christian minority who had fled
their homes in Iraq after Islamic extremists began killing and
kidnapping men in their community. Zaya said he had worked on an
American military base in Iraq, doing laundry for the troops.
The United States was giving few visas to Iraqi refugees, so they'd
struck out for America and were caught by Mexican immigration. Mexican
and U.S. intelligence agents interviewed them in custody as part of a
secret counterterrorism program aimed at capturing immigrants from
places such as the Middle East.
While other Middle Easterners who provoke some level of suspicion get
deported to their homelands, Boles and his two new friends eventually
were released with papers ordering them to either leave the country or
apply for Mexican residency within two weeks.
The choice was clear.
It made sense that the three young men would band together for the
final leg of their journey. There was safety in numbers, but they also
had much in common. They were from the same Iraqi province of Mosul
and all in their early to mid-20s. All had fled the war.
In the Mexican jail, Zaya and Piuz incorrectly told Boles about a
surefire way to get legal status after they crossed into America. All
they'd have to do was plant their feet on U.S. soil, find a government
representative and claim political asylum. The Americans would have to
give them a fair hearing on claims of religious persecution in Iraq,
and maybe they could get permanent residency and a path to
citizenship.
Before the end of their first day of freedom in Mexico, Boles and his
compatriots sat crowded together in the sleeper compartment of
Antonio's tractor-trailer cab. The truck was barreling northeast from
Mexico City toward the northern industrial city of Monterrey, nearly
600 miles away.
In Monterrey, the men transferred with Antonio to a different truck,
this one bound for Matamoros, another 200 miles north and just across
the border from Brownsville.
Nearly a full year after flying out of Damascus, Boles was almost to
his goal now.
His excitement and apprehension grew.
In Matamoros, Antonio handed the travelers over to another man. They
were driven by car over dirt roads that wound through farmland and
came to a stop a half-mile from the Rio Grande. It still was dark.
Boles and his two companions followed the coyote over dirt trails.
The smuggler told them not to talk; Border Patrol agents could be just
over the other side. They stripped to their shoes, bundled their
clothes and shuffled down the riverbank to the neck-deep, fast-moving
green water of the Rio Grande. At 5:20 a.m. April 29, 2006, they waded
across to Texas one at a time using an inner tube.
The men scrambled back into their clothes. They were about 6 miles
east of the rural town of Los Indios.
"America!" Boles thought as he faced towering sugar cane fields. "I'm
finally here. I've made it to America."
His joy would be short-lived.
Boles' small group triggered a motion detector while hiking up a dirt
road toward U.S. 281. U.S. Border Patrol agents in three SUVs rumbled
out of their hiding places to check the area.
Boles and his companions were hiding in brush when they saw the green
and white vehicles coming toward them. They leapt out with hands
raised and ran toward what they thought was salvation.
"Iraqi Christians! Iraqi Christians! Iraqi Christians!" they shouted
over and over, jumping up and down. "Political asylum! Political
asylum!"
None of them could have known they already were marked men.
A flawed system
Federal agents from Texas to California and from Maine to Washington
go on red alert whenever a special-interest immigrant gets caught
crossing the border - or at least they are supposed to.
The goal is to put everyone captured, regardless of nationality, into
deportation proceedings or immediately send them back. The routine is
to run the fingerprints and names of apprehended border crossers
through interlocking government databases that look for criminal
history, outstanding warrants or past immigration violations.
But apprehensions of border jumpers hailing from the Middle East,
North Africa and South Asia trigger under-the-radar procedures that go
well beyond these first rudimentary checks.
Border Patrol agents are supposed to run these names through the
agency's National Targeting Center database, which looks for any link
to terrorism or flags when other agencies have an investigative
interest in the name.
The next step is to notify the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force,
which has its own more extensive databases and access to
counterterrorism and intelligence resources. The Border Patrol has
logged hundreds of such referrals to the FBI each year since 9-11.
Border Patrol agents made 644 referrals in 2004, 647 in 2005 and 563
in 2006, according to agency data requested by the San Antonio Express-
News. If sufficient suspicions are aroused, the FBI can place a
national security "hold" on an immigrant to keep him in custody while
agents investigate further.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Ralph Diaz, who oversees bureau activities
in South Texas from his San Antonio headquarters, said an effort then
is made to interview every special-interest immigrant in person.
"They're not all necessarily a threat," Diaz said. "But we don't have
the luxury of presuming that. The flag goes up and we say, 'Let's take
a look at this.'"
The workload is not insubstantial. More than 1,500 special-interest
immigrants have been captured in Texas since 9-11, including nearly
300 between March 2006 and April, among them Boles and his two
companions, along with Iranians, Yemenis and Afghans. Diaz and other
FBI officials familiar with special-interest immigrant assessments
said the vast majority are determined to be economic refugees or
people fleeing wars and political persecution.
"It's not reached a level where we've had a threat to national
security in the San Antonio district," said Diaz, who has been on the
job about a year.
Other federal counterterrorism authorities, however, say they have
connected some border jumpers to terrorism. Among them was a South
African woman of Middle Eastern descent whose July 2004 arrest at the
McAllen airport with wet clothes, thousands in cash and a mutilated
passport made international headlines.
Farida Goolam Ahmed eventually was charged with a simple illegal entry
offense and quietly deported, but key documents remain sealed. A Dec.
9, 2004, U.S. Border and Transportation Security intelligence summary,
accidentally released on the Internet, states that Ahmed was "linked
to specific terrorist activities."
Government officials familiar with the case now confirm Ahmed was a
smuggler based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who specialized in
moving special-interest immigrants into the United States along a
United Arab Emirates-London-Mexico City-McAllen pipeline.
Houston-based federal prosecutor Abe Martinez, chief of the Southern
District of Texas national security section in the U.S. attorney's
office, was asked if Ahmed or anyone she smuggled might have been
involved in terrorism.
"Were they linked to any terrorism organizations?" Martinez said. "I
would have to say yes."
Martinez and a number of Texas-based FBI officials declined to
elaborate. But an August 2004 report that appeared in the Washington-
based Homeland Security Today quoted several unnamed government
counterterrorism officials as saying Ahmed also was found to be
ferrying "instructions" from a Mexico al-Qaida cell to another cell in
New York.
The article reported Ahmed's arrest led the CIA to capture two al-
Qaida members in Mexico and several Pakistani al-Qaida members in
Pakistan and in Britain who all were part of the plot to attack
targets in New York.
The Express-News couldn't independently corroborate the Homeland
Security Today report.
Other immigrants who have prompted some level of uncertainty or
suspicion end up deported to their home countries.
Kyle Brown, an immigration attorney in McAllen, said two Afghans he
represented had their asylum applications denied and were deported
after the FBI discovered "a series of telephone numbers" in their
possession.
"One of them (telephone numbers) led back to a link to terrorism,"
Brown said.
But FBI officials, including San Antonio's Diaz, acknowledge the
bureau's current system of assessing whether someone is a terrorist is
far from error-free.
Often, immigrants show up with no documents or with fakes. FBI agents
could have little to run through terror watch list databases, or, when
a name is real, it might not be entered.
"You interview them, run every database possible, fingerprints, watch
lists, check their stories. You get some sort of a feel of their
sophistication," said an FBI official who works along the Southwest
border. "Could we be fooled? Of course."
Last year, a Homeland Security Department audit cited weaknesses in
the government's ability to differentiate between persecuted political
asylum seekers and terrorists.
"The effectiveness of these background checks is uncertain due to the
difficulty verifying the identity, country of origin, terrorist or
criminal affiliation of aliens in general," the audit report stated.
"Therefore, the release of these (migrants) poses particular risks."
FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents concede they can't
get around to interviewing every captured special-interest immigrant.
Until thousands of new detention beds were ready last year, Border
Patrol and ICE routinely released special-interest immigrants on their
own recognizance, usually never to reappear, simply because there was
nowhere to keep them.
New detention space lets the government hold more undocumented
immigrants for deportation proceedings. But even then, some are let go
and not fully investigated, according to a review of hundreds of
intelligence summary reports showing law enforcement activity along
the Texas-Mexico border.
The reports suggest the FBI is not always getting referrals, and full
investigations aren't being conducted.
One of many such examples occurred Dec. 1, according to an
intelligence summary report from that day. "Sudanese detained at
Carrizo Springs station. Released." The State Department lists Sudan
as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Three days later, agents picked up a Pakistani at a checkpoint in Val
Verde. "No derogatory," the report stated, referring to a watch-list
check. "Released." Two days after that, Border Patrol agents picked up
an Iraqi and had a watch-list check run on his name, too. "No
derogatory info. Released."
Sometimes Border Patrol agents exercise a new authority provided by
Congress to simply expel undocumented immigrants back to Mexico
without court oversight, a process known as "expedited removal."
While helping to reduce congestion in detention centers and
courtrooms, expedited removal also loses opportunities to investigate
the immigrants and their smugglers.
In a typical such instance, on June 20, Border Patrol agents arrested
an Eritrean national in McAllen.
"Subject stated that he flew from Sudan to Mexico City using a photo-
substituted French passport," the report stated. "He was processed for
expedited removal."
The Lord's Prayer
To American agents, Boles and his two fellow Iraqi travelers were big
question marks. Like many special-interest immigrants, they were
captured with no identification or documents, just a story about being
persecuted Christians in need of safe harbor. Their inability to back
their story with evidence - even to prove the validity of their given
names - would bode ill.
Border Patrol officers who caught Boles transported him to one of
their facilities in Brownsville, where his name once again was run
through the databases. Those checks came out clean. The FBI was
notified that Iraqis had been caught at the river. But still no one
could say for sure who they were.
Before Boles' first day in American custody was over, immigration
authorities in Brownsville charged him and his two compatriots with
the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry, which carries a maximum
punishment of six months in prison.
Boles' appointed attorney, Humberto Yzaguirre Jr., recalls assuring
his three clients that the charge was routine and they would serve no
time. They would plead guilty, be given time served and then get out
on bond to pursue political asylum claims - assuming the FBI quickly
cleared them.
Yzaguirre had seen it happen this way a thousand times, he told them.
But it wasn't to be.
No one in the Brownsville federal court system was ready to believe
that Boles, Zaya and Piuz were Christians.
All three Iraqis had pleaded guilty and were awaiting their sentencing
before U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Felix Recio, scheduled for May 5,
2006.
In the meantime, the court had ordered probation officers to interview
the three Iraqis to collect their stories and make recommendations to
the judge.
Attorney Paul Hajjar, a Lebanese American hired as a defense
interpreter for the proceedings, recalled overhearing the Iraqis
talking among themselves in a dialect that was not Arabic. He
recognized it as a contemporary derivative of the ancient Aramaic
language dating to the days of Jesus Christ. It is spoken only by
Middle East Christians.
Hajjar asked Piuz about the language. Just then, the Iraqi broke out
with a heartfelt rendition of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, loudly
enough for all to hear.
Piuz closed his eyes as he continued slowly, bowed his head and spoke
the words of the prayer with what appeared to be deeply felt angst,
Yzaguirre recalled, as though he hoped God could help him out of the
situation. When he finished, Hajjar turned to the probation officers.
These men, he said, could not be Muslims.
"See? They are exactly who they say they are," he said. "I don't see
Muslims saying the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. A Muslim wouldn't speak
Aramaic to begin with, and they certainly wouldn't know the Lord's
Prayer."
The display wouldn't help the group. It wasn't included in the report
that would go to the judge. And the FBI still hadn't shown up.
Taking no chances
Magistrate Judge Recio already had decided he wasn't taking any
chances with Iraqis.
"Mr. Boles," the judge said at their sentencing hearing, "good
morning. Do you have anything you wish to say to the court?"
"No," Boles replied in Arabic, then added, "If you could just give us
some consideration."
"Mr. Piuz, do you have anything you want to say to the court?"
Meekly, Piuz replied, "Just, if you could take care of us."
Next, Recio asked Yzaguirre the same thing. Yzaguirre assured the
judge that no evidence had surfaced indicating that his clients were
Muslims instead of Christians.
The judge then turned to the government's prosecutor, Assistant U.S.
Attorney Dan Marposon, for his opinion.
Marposon, who has declined several interview requests, said he
concurred with the pre-sentence report's recommendation of minimal
punishment, the usual time served.
But Recio, who didn't respond to three interview requests for this
report, was about to surprise the government's prosecutor and everyone
else in his courtroom.
"We know that this country is in war in Iraq," he said. "We know the
problems associated with all of that, and it gives reason for this
court to be cautious and to take things into consideration carefully
and to apply the law to them as carefully as possible."
Recio went on to express skepticism about the Iraqis' stated motives
for coming to the United States when they could have stayed in Europe
or gone elsewhere much more easily. He said he doubted their story
that they'd all met for the first time in Mexico when the three men
came from the same province.
"It would be highly unlikely that if you're released from any Mexican
prison that you would be released with any money whatsoever," the
judge said. "So someone is financing you, or you're receiving funds
from someplace. We have no idea where those funds are coming from."
The judge reserved special ire for the government.
"I might add the government has been very lax in coming forth with any
evidence to either support or go against the claims of these
individuals," he said. "Who did they check? What did they check? What
did they verify? Who did they talk to? I don't know."
Recio sentenced them to six months in prison.
"We want to promote respect for the law. We want to protect the public
from further crimes, and we want to provide a deterrence for other
criminal conduct," he said.
The gavel came down with a crack.
The hearing had lasted 15 minutes.
Boles, Piuz and Zaya were devastated. The U.S. marshals handcuffed
them and led them away to prison.
Tougher grilling
About a week later, the FBI showed up. The experience would not be
pleasant.
Two men from the bureau, an ICE agent and a Lebanese interpreter
arrived at the jail where the prisoners were being held.
Boles found their questions insulting and their manner brusque and
intimidating, unlike his experience with the Americans who had
questioned him in Mexico.
The agents, he later recounted, demanded to know why he had come to
America, and the names of the smugglers who brought him.
They began asking personal questions, like if he had sampled tequila
while in Mexico and what it had felt like, knowing that practicing
Muslims who don't drink alcohol wouldn't have an answer.
Agents demanded to know about his military experience. Boles believed
his three-month incarceration in Mexico was the result of admitting
he'd been a conscript in Saddam Hussein's army. So he lied this time.
"No, I never served in the military," Boles told the agents.
But the agents had his statements from Mexico. They pounced, hoping to
break down a possible cover story.
"Don't you think we know what you said in Mexico? You're a liar!"
For the next five hours, they grilled Boles.
They threatened to charge him with lying to federal law enforcement
officers, a felony that could bring a five-year sentence, unless he
told them who he really was and what he was doing sneaking into
America.
They threatened to send him back and force him to join the new Iraqi
army, where he would probably suffer a violent death.
At last, the agents left Boles, exhausted and feeling hostile toward
the country he hoped would adopt him.
New agents would return three weeks later and interview him again
about the details of his life and travels, most likely looking for
inconsistencies.
That was the last he heard from the FBI and ICE.
Mixed-up feelings
Boles spent his 26th birthday behind bars.
After he completed his sentence in November 2006, he was remanded to
the custody of immigration authorities and transferred to a federal
detention facility near Port Isabel. Once again, Pakistanis,
Jordanians and Yemenis were among his cellmates.
Most immigrants in similar situations probably would be deported at
this point or be eligible to pay a bond and be freed while pursuing a
political asylum claim. But the FBI still had not cleared Boles, and
until it did he would remain in limbo.
Relatives in Detroit hired Harlingen immigration lawyer Thelma Garcia,
and she began pushing government lawyers to secure a ruling from the
FBI. Finally, toward the end of the year, the FBI notified the court
that it had cleared Boles. He was not a national security risk.
But suspicion can be hard to overcome in Texas, at least when it comes
to Iraqis during a war. There was still no proof of his Christian
identity and his story of persecution at the hands of Muslims.
Boles would be asked one last time to prove his credibility with a
test of his religious faith.
Garcia quickly moved to get a hearing date that would allow Boles to
bond out and go to Detroit.
U.S. Immigration Judge William C. Peterson presided over the hearing
Jan. 3. The government's lawyer was Assistant Chief Counsel Sean
Clancy.
Clancy, who some people think resembles actor Randy Quaid, is a
classic Irishman. He has fair features and reddish hair. He wore a
crisp suit.
Clancy put Boles through his final test, opening with a battery of
questions designed to ascertain, finally, whether he was who he said
he was. Garcia's notes from the proceeding chronicle this unusual
courtroom exchange:
"What's a Christian?" the prosecutor asked.
Clancy was assertive without being confrontational.
"We believe in Jesus as our savior and we believe in God," Boles
replied.
Clancy seemed to accept the answer, Garcia thought.
"Who is Jesus and where did he come from?" Clancy asked Boles.
"He is the son of God, son of Joseph and the son of David."
"Was he just another man?"
"No, he was the son of God."
"How often do you pray?"
"I pray every Sunday, three times a day."
"What do you do on Sunday?
"I go to morning Mass."
"What's Mass?"
"We pray with a Bible."
"What's Communion?"
"We take the body of Jesus Christ."
"In what form do you take Communion?"
"Bread. Wafers. The priest prays over it and then we eat it."
Clancy turned to the judge.
"That's all I have," he said. "It's up to the court, your honor."
Peterson set Boles' bond at $1,500. Relatives paid it a couple days
later and then wired money for bus fare to his lawyer in Harlingen. It
was enough for a one-way trip to Detroit aboard a Greyhound.
The next night, on Jan. 6, a Border Patrol agent drove Boles to a bus
station in Brownsville and let him off at 11 p.m. with all of his
worldly possessions: a bag filled with a few basic toiletries, extra
socks and underwear and some documents. He wore a red Nike baseball
cap, a brown corduroy sport coat and a grim expression.
Boles felt bitter. He did not think the FBI and the U.S. judicial
system had treated him well.
But he was ready to get on with his new life.
"My feelings about America are all mixed up," he said as he ate his
first American meal as a free man, a cheeseburger and fries at the
Brownsville Cafe. "We knew they'd do an investigation of us, but why
did it have to be a criminal investigation? I believe it was an unfair
sentence for him to send us to jail."
But Boles, who had not had much to laugh about in a long time,
couldn't contain his dry sense of humor.
Casting a sideways glance, he said with the measured delivery of a
standup comic:
"I know they have to protect your country.
"But why take so long to do it?"
The long journey of Aamr Bahnan Boles from Iraq had consumed almost
three years of his life. Along the way, some of his enthusiasm had
been lost, the joy of second chances tempered, the burden of freedom,
loneliness of secrecy and imperfections of America all driven home.
"I feel lost," he said. "It's the first time I've been free."
Boles probably will remain free, though his claim for political asylum
continues wending its way through the system. Returning to a Texas
courtroom, which Boles must do in August, needn't worry him, said
Martinez, the prosecutor who oversaw the FBI's handling of Boles.
"His story," Martinez said, "is true."
On a Saturday morning in January, that story, a refugee's story,
entered its final chapter as Boles stepped onto a Greyhound bus in
Brownsville. It took him north through Harlingen into the vast expanse
of Texas and then into America's heartland.
Forty-four hours and many stops later, the odyssey from Damascus to
Detroit ended at another Greyhound depot, and Boles began a new life.
--
News Researcher Julie Domel contributed to this report.
<http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/
MYSA052307.1A.SIA.PartIV.3bafbdd.html>
http://tinyurl.com/3arzlj
Web Posted: 05/23/2007 02:12 AM CDT
Todd Bensman, Express-News
Last part of a four-part series
BROWNSVILLE - The human smuggler offering to help Aamr Bahnan Boles
and his two friends cross the border into America was tall, dark and
pricey.
"I can get you to Texas, no problem," he told them. "For a thousand
dollars each."
Boles and the others had just walked out of the detention center for
immigrants in Mexico City. The guards, knowing the three were about to
be freed after three months in custody, had arranged the rendezvous
with a smuggler.
Boles would recall later how the smuggler - in street parlance a
coyote, or someone who makes a living helping undocumented immigrants
cross the border - was leaning against a tractor-trailer rig outside
the jail gates.
He said his name was Antonio.
"Where are you from and where do you want to go?" the smuggler asked.
"We are Iraqis," Boles said in halting Spanish, "and we want to go to
America."
Boles, a Chaldean Christian determined to escape the Iraq war, is
categorized by the U.S. government as a "special-interest alien,"
those from 43 countries where terror groups are known to operate. As
such, they can be subjected to extra screening and harsher treatment
than other immigrants when caught crossing illegally.
Near the end of his journey to America - born in the shadows of a
Damascus, Syria, restaurant and culminating nearly a year later with
the final push into Texas - Boles ran smack into this post-9-11
security net.
But the system is fallible, and just as likely to punish the
benevolent as to release the dangerous.
On the U.S. side, authorities are feeling their way sometimes blind
and scared. Once over the Texas border, Boles would encounter various
jail cells, a skeptical magistrate, a distrusting government lawyer
and a bizarre courtroom quiz about his biblical knowledge where his
very freedom hinged on the right answers.
Boles managed to cling to his last couple thousand dollars after
Mexican immigration agents plucked him off a bus from Guatemala, where
he had arrived eight months earlier after an air trip from Damascus to
Moscow and through Cuba. His new traveling companions, Ammar Habib
Zaya and Remon Manssor Piuz, also had money.
Zaya and Piuz, like Boles and many Iraqis caught traveling through
Mexico, said they were members of a Christian minority who had fled
their homes in Iraq after Islamic extremists began killing and
kidnapping men in their community. Zaya said he had worked on an
American military base in Iraq, doing laundry for the troops.
The United States was giving few visas to Iraqi refugees, so they'd
struck out for America and were caught by Mexican immigration. Mexican
and U.S. intelligence agents interviewed them in custody as part of a
secret counterterrorism program aimed at capturing immigrants from
places such as the Middle East.
While other Middle Easterners who provoke some level of suspicion get
deported to their homelands, Boles and his two new friends eventually
were released with papers ordering them to either leave the country or
apply for Mexican residency within two weeks.
The choice was clear.
It made sense that the three young men would band together for the
final leg of their journey. There was safety in numbers, but they also
had much in common. They were from the same Iraqi province of Mosul
and all in their early to mid-20s. All had fled the war.
In the Mexican jail, Zaya and Piuz incorrectly told Boles about a
surefire way to get legal status after they crossed into America. All
they'd have to do was plant their feet on U.S. soil, find a government
representative and claim political asylum. The Americans would have to
give them a fair hearing on claims of religious persecution in Iraq,
and maybe they could get permanent residency and a path to
citizenship.
Before the end of their first day of freedom in Mexico, Boles and his
compatriots sat crowded together in the sleeper compartment of
Antonio's tractor-trailer cab. The truck was barreling northeast from
Mexico City toward the northern industrial city of Monterrey, nearly
600 miles away.
In Monterrey, the men transferred with Antonio to a different truck,
this one bound for Matamoros, another 200 miles north and just across
the border from Brownsville.
Nearly a full year after flying out of Damascus, Boles was almost to
his goal now.
His excitement and apprehension grew.
In Matamoros, Antonio handed the travelers over to another man. They
were driven by car over dirt roads that wound through farmland and
came to a stop a half-mile from the Rio Grande. It still was dark.
Boles and his two companions followed the coyote over dirt trails.
The smuggler told them not to talk; Border Patrol agents could be just
over the other side. They stripped to their shoes, bundled their
clothes and shuffled down the riverbank to the neck-deep, fast-moving
green water of the Rio Grande. At 5:20 a.m. April 29, 2006, they waded
across to Texas one at a time using an inner tube.
The men scrambled back into their clothes. They were about 6 miles
east of the rural town of Los Indios.
"America!" Boles thought as he faced towering sugar cane fields. "I'm
finally here. I've made it to America."
His joy would be short-lived.
Boles' small group triggered a motion detector while hiking up a dirt
road toward U.S. 281. U.S. Border Patrol agents in three SUVs rumbled
out of their hiding places to check the area.
Boles and his companions were hiding in brush when they saw the green
and white vehicles coming toward them. They leapt out with hands
raised and ran toward what they thought was salvation.
"Iraqi Christians! Iraqi Christians! Iraqi Christians!" they shouted
over and over, jumping up and down. "Political asylum! Political
asylum!"
None of them could have known they already were marked men.
A flawed system
Federal agents from Texas to California and from Maine to Washington
go on red alert whenever a special-interest immigrant gets caught
crossing the border - or at least they are supposed to.
The goal is to put everyone captured, regardless of nationality, into
deportation proceedings or immediately send them back. The routine is
to run the fingerprints and names of apprehended border crossers
through interlocking government databases that look for criminal
history, outstanding warrants or past immigration violations.
But apprehensions of border jumpers hailing from the Middle East,
North Africa and South Asia trigger under-the-radar procedures that go
well beyond these first rudimentary checks.
Border Patrol agents are supposed to run these names through the
agency's National Targeting Center database, which looks for any link
to terrorism or flags when other agencies have an investigative
interest in the name.
The next step is to notify the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force,
which has its own more extensive databases and access to
counterterrorism and intelligence resources. The Border Patrol has
logged hundreds of such referrals to the FBI each year since 9-11.
Border Patrol agents made 644 referrals in 2004, 647 in 2005 and 563
in 2006, according to agency data requested by the San Antonio Express-
News. If sufficient suspicions are aroused, the FBI can place a
national security "hold" on an immigrant to keep him in custody while
agents investigate further.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Ralph Diaz, who oversees bureau activities
in South Texas from his San Antonio headquarters, said an effort then
is made to interview every special-interest immigrant in person.
"They're not all necessarily a threat," Diaz said. "But we don't have
the luxury of presuming that. The flag goes up and we say, 'Let's take
a look at this.'"
The workload is not insubstantial. More than 1,500 special-interest
immigrants have been captured in Texas since 9-11, including nearly
300 between March 2006 and April, among them Boles and his two
companions, along with Iranians, Yemenis and Afghans. Diaz and other
FBI officials familiar with special-interest immigrant assessments
said the vast majority are determined to be economic refugees or
people fleeing wars and political persecution.
"It's not reached a level where we've had a threat to national
security in the San Antonio district," said Diaz, who has been on the
job about a year.
Other federal counterterrorism authorities, however, say they have
connected some border jumpers to terrorism. Among them was a South
African woman of Middle Eastern descent whose July 2004 arrest at the
McAllen airport with wet clothes, thousands in cash and a mutilated
passport made international headlines.
Farida Goolam Ahmed eventually was charged with a simple illegal entry
offense and quietly deported, but key documents remain sealed. A Dec.
9, 2004, U.S. Border and Transportation Security intelligence summary,
accidentally released on the Internet, states that Ahmed was "linked
to specific terrorist activities."
Government officials familiar with the case now confirm Ahmed was a
smuggler based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who specialized in
moving special-interest immigrants into the United States along a
United Arab Emirates-London-Mexico City-McAllen pipeline.
Houston-based federal prosecutor Abe Martinez, chief of the Southern
District of Texas national security section in the U.S. attorney's
office, was asked if Ahmed or anyone she smuggled might have been
involved in terrorism.
"Were they linked to any terrorism organizations?" Martinez said. "I
would have to say yes."
Martinez and a number of Texas-based FBI officials declined to
elaborate. But an August 2004 report that appeared in the Washington-
based Homeland Security Today quoted several unnamed government
counterterrorism officials as saying Ahmed also was found to be
ferrying "instructions" from a Mexico al-Qaida cell to another cell in
New York.
The article reported Ahmed's arrest led the CIA to capture two al-
Qaida members in Mexico and several Pakistani al-Qaida members in
Pakistan and in Britain who all were part of the plot to attack
targets in New York.
The Express-News couldn't independently corroborate the Homeland
Security Today report.
Other immigrants who have prompted some level of uncertainty or
suspicion end up deported to their home countries.
Kyle Brown, an immigration attorney in McAllen, said two Afghans he
represented had their asylum applications denied and were deported
after the FBI discovered "a series of telephone numbers" in their
possession.
"One of them (telephone numbers) led back to a link to terrorism,"
Brown said.
But FBI officials, including San Antonio's Diaz, acknowledge the
bureau's current system of assessing whether someone is a terrorist is
far from error-free.
Often, immigrants show up with no documents or with fakes. FBI agents
could have little to run through terror watch list databases, or, when
a name is real, it might not be entered.
"You interview them, run every database possible, fingerprints, watch
lists, check their stories. You get some sort of a feel of their
sophistication," said an FBI official who works along the Southwest
border. "Could we be fooled? Of course."
Last year, a Homeland Security Department audit cited weaknesses in
the government's ability to differentiate between persecuted political
asylum seekers and terrorists.
"The effectiveness of these background checks is uncertain due to the
difficulty verifying the identity, country of origin, terrorist or
criminal affiliation of aliens in general," the audit report stated.
"Therefore, the release of these (migrants) poses particular risks."
FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents concede they can't
get around to interviewing every captured special-interest immigrant.
Until thousands of new detention beds were ready last year, Border
Patrol and ICE routinely released special-interest immigrants on their
own recognizance, usually never to reappear, simply because there was
nowhere to keep them.
New detention space lets the government hold more undocumented
immigrants for deportation proceedings. But even then, some are let go
and not fully investigated, according to a review of hundreds of
intelligence summary reports showing law enforcement activity along
the Texas-Mexico border.
The reports suggest the FBI is not always getting referrals, and full
investigations aren't being conducted.
One of many such examples occurred Dec. 1, according to an
intelligence summary report from that day. "Sudanese detained at
Carrizo Springs station. Released." The State Department lists Sudan
as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Three days later, agents picked up a Pakistani at a checkpoint in Val
Verde. "No derogatory," the report stated, referring to a watch-list
check. "Released." Two days after that, Border Patrol agents picked up
an Iraqi and had a watch-list check run on his name, too. "No
derogatory info. Released."
Sometimes Border Patrol agents exercise a new authority provided by
Congress to simply expel undocumented immigrants back to Mexico
without court oversight, a process known as "expedited removal."
While helping to reduce congestion in detention centers and
courtrooms, expedited removal also loses opportunities to investigate
the immigrants and their smugglers.
In a typical such instance, on June 20, Border Patrol agents arrested
an Eritrean national in McAllen.
"Subject stated that he flew from Sudan to Mexico City using a photo-
substituted French passport," the report stated. "He was processed for
expedited removal."
The Lord's Prayer
To American agents, Boles and his two fellow Iraqi travelers were big
question marks. Like many special-interest immigrants, they were
captured with no identification or documents, just a story about being
persecuted Christians in need of safe harbor. Their inability to back
their story with evidence - even to prove the validity of their given
names - would bode ill.
Border Patrol officers who caught Boles transported him to one of
their facilities in Brownsville, where his name once again was run
through the databases. Those checks came out clean. The FBI was
notified that Iraqis had been caught at the river. But still no one
could say for sure who they were.
Before Boles' first day in American custody was over, immigration
authorities in Brownsville charged him and his two compatriots with
the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry, which carries a maximum
punishment of six months in prison.
Boles' appointed attorney, Humberto Yzaguirre Jr., recalls assuring
his three clients that the charge was routine and they would serve no
time. They would plead guilty, be given time served and then get out
on bond to pursue political asylum claims - assuming the FBI quickly
cleared them.
Yzaguirre had seen it happen this way a thousand times, he told them.
But it wasn't to be.
No one in the Brownsville federal court system was ready to believe
that Boles, Zaya and Piuz were Christians.
All three Iraqis had pleaded guilty and were awaiting their sentencing
before U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Felix Recio, scheduled for May 5,
2006.
In the meantime, the court had ordered probation officers to interview
the three Iraqis to collect their stories and make recommendations to
the judge.
Attorney Paul Hajjar, a Lebanese American hired as a defense
interpreter for the proceedings, recalled overhearing the Iraqis
talking among themselves in a dialect that was not Arabic. He
recognized it as a contemporary derivative of the ancient Aramaic
language dating to the days of Jesus Christ. It is spoken only by
Middle East Christians.
Hajjar asked Piuz about the language. Just then, the Iraqi broke out
with a heartfelt rendition of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, loudly
enough for all to hear.
Piuz closed his eyes as he continued slowly, bowed his head and spoke
the words of the prayer with what appeared to be deeply felt angst,
Yzaguirre recalled, as though he hoped God could help him out of the
situation. When he finished, Hajjar turned to the probation officers.
These men, he said, could not be Muslims.
"See? They are exactly who they say they are," he said. "I don't see
Muslims saying the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. A Muslim wouldn't speak
Aramaic to begin with, and they certainly wouldn't know the Lord's
Prayer."
The display wouldn't help the group. It wasn't included in the report
that would go to the judge. And the FBI still hadn't shown up.
Taking no chances
Magistrate Judge Recio already had decided he wasn't taking any
chances with Iraqis.
"Mr. Boles," the judge said at their sentencing hearing, "good
morning. Do you have anything you wish to say to the court?"
"No," Boles replied in Arabic, then added, "If you could just give us
some consideration."
"Mr. Piuz, do you have anything you want to say to the court?"
Meekly, Piuz replied, "Just, if you could take care of us."
Next, Recio asked Yzaguirre the same thing. Yzaguirre assured the
judge that no evidence had surfaced indicating that his clients were
Muslims instead of Christians.
The judge then turned to the government's prosecutor, Assistant U.S.
Attorney Dan Marposon, for his opinion.
Marposon, who has declined several interview requests, said he
concurred with the pre-sentence report's recommendation of minimal
punishment, the usual time served.
But Recio, who didn't respond to three interview requests for this
report, was about to surprise the government's prosecutor and everyone
else in his courtroom.
"We know that this country is in war in Iraq," he said. "We know the
problems associated with all of that, and it gives reason for this
court to be cautious and to take things into consideration carefully
and to apply the law to them as carefully as possible."
Recio went on to express skepticism about the Iraqis' stated motives
for coming to the United States when they could have stayed in Europe
or gone elsewhere much more easily. He said he doubted their story
that they'd all met for the first time in Mexico when the three men
came from the same province.
"It would be highly unlikely that if you're released from any Mexican
prison that you would be released with any money whatsoever," the
judge said. "So someone is financing you, or you're receiving funds
from someplace. We have no idea where those funds are coming from."
The judge reserved special ire for the government.
"I might add the government has been very lax in coming forth with any
evidence to either support or go against the claims of these
individuals," he said. "Who did they check? What did they check? What
did they verify? Who did they talk to? I don't know."
Recio sentenced them to six months in prison.
"We want to promote respect for the law. We want to protect the public
from further crimes, and we want to provide a deterrence for other
criminal conduct," he said.
The gavel came down with a crack.
The hearing had lasted 15 minutes.
Boles, Piuz and Zaya were devastated. The U.S. marshals handcuffed
them and led them away to prison.
Tougher grilling
About a week later, the FBI showed up. The experience would not be
pleasant.
Two men from the bureau, an ICE agent and a Lebanese interpreter
arrived at the jail where the prisoners were being held.
Boles found their questions insulting and their manner brusque and
intimidating, unlike his experience with the Americans who had
questioned him in Mexico.
The agents, he later recounted, demanded to know why he had come to
America, and the names of the smugglers who brought him.
They began asking personal questions, like if he had sampled tequila
while in Mexico and what it had felt like, knowing that practicing
Muslims who don't drink alcohol wouldn't have an answer.
Agents demanded to know about his military experience. Boles believed
his three-month incarceration in Mexico was the result of admitting
he'd been a conscript in Saddam Hussein's army. So he lied this time.
"No, I never served in the military," Boles told the agents.
But the agents had his statements from Mexico. They pounced, hoping to
break down a possible cover story.
"Don't you think we know what you said in Mexico? You're a liar!"
For the next five hours, they grilled Boles.
They threatened to charge him with lying to federal law enforcement
officers, a felony that could bring a five-year sentence, unless he
told them who he really was and what he was doing sneaking into
America.
They threatened to send him back and force him to join the new Iraqi
army, where he would probably suffer a violent death.
At last, the agents left Boles, exhausted and feeling hostile toward
the country he hoped would adopt him.
New agents would return three weeks later and interview him again
about the details of his life and travels, most likely looking for
inconsistencies.
That was the last he heard from the FBI and ICE.
Mixed-up feelings
Boles spent his 26th birthday behind bars.
After he completed his sentence in November 2006, he was remanded to
the custody of immigration authorities and transferred to a federal
detention facility near Port Isabel. Once again, Pakistanis,
Jordanians and Yemenis were among his cellmates.
Most immigrants in similar situations probably would be deported at
this point or be eligible to pay a bond and be freed while pursuing a
political asylum claim. But the FBI still had not cleared Boles, and
until it did he would remain in limbo.
Relatives in Detroit hired Harlingen immigration lawyer Thelma Garcia,
and she began pushing government lawyers to secure a ruling from the
FBI. Finally, toward the end of the year, the FBI notified the court
that it had cleared Boles. He was not a national security risk.
But suspicion can be hard to overcome in Texas, at least when it comes
to Iraqis during a war. There was still no proof of his Christian
identity and his story of persecution at the hands of Muslims.
Boles would be asked one last time to prove his credibility with a
test of his religious faith.
Garcia quickly moved to get a hearing date that would allow Boles to
bond out and go to Detroit.
U.S. Immigration Judge William C. Peterson presided over the hearing
Jan. 3. The government's lawyer was Assistant Chief Counsel Sean
Clancy.
Clancy, who some people think resembles actor Randy Quaid, is a
classic Irishman. He has fair features and reddish hair. He wore a
crisp suit.
Clancy put Boles through his final test, opening with a battery of
questions designed to ascertain, finally, whether he was who he said
he was. Garcia's notes from the proceeding chronicle this unusual
courtroom exchange:
"What's a Christian?" the prosecutor asked.
Clancy was assertive without being confrontational.
"We believe in Jesus as our savior and we believe in God," Boles
replied.
Clancy seemed to accept the answer, Garcia thought.
"Who is Jesus and where did he come from?" Clancy asked Boles.
"He is the son of God, son of Joseph and the son of David."
"Was he just another man?"
"No, he was the son of God."
"How often do you pray?"
"I pray every Sunday, three times a day."
"What do you do on Sunday?
"I go to morning Mass."
"What's Mass?"
"We pray with a Bible."
"What's Communion?"
"We take the body of Jesus Christ."
"In what form do you take Communion?"
"Bread. Wafers. The priest prays over it and then we eat it."
Clancy turned to the judge.
"That's all I have," he said. "It's up to the court, your honor."
Peterson set Boles' bond at $1,500. Relatives paid it a couple days
later and then wired money for bus fare to his lawyer in Harlingen. It
was enough for a one-way trip to Detroit aboard a Greyhound.
The next night, on Jan. 6, a Border Patrol agent drove Boles to a bus
station in Brownsville and let him off at 11 p.m. with all of his
worldly possessions: a bag filled with a few basic toiletries, extra
socks and underwear and some documents. He wore a red Nike baseball
cap, a brown corduroy sport coat and a grim expression.
Boles felt bitter. He did not think the FBI and the U.S. judicial
system had treated him well.
But he was ready to get on with his new life.
"My feelings about America are all mixed up," he said as he ate his
first American meal as a free man, a cheeseburger and fries at the
Brownsville Cafe. "We knew they'd do an investigation of us, but why
did it have to be a criminal investigation? I believe it was an unfair
sentence for him to send us to jail."
But Boles, who had not had much to laugh about in a long time,
couldn't contain his dry sense of humor.
Casting a sideways glance, he said with the measured delivery of a
standup comic:
"I know they have to protect your country.
"But why take so long to do it?"
The long journey of Aamr Bahnan Boles from Iraq had consumed almost
three years of his life. Along the way, some of his enthusiasm had
been lost, the joy of second chances tempered, the burden of freedom,
loneliness of secrecy and imperfections of America all driven home.
"I feel lost," he said. "It's the first time I've been free."
Boles probably will remain free, though his claim for political asylum
continues wending its way through the system. Returning to a Texas
courtroom, which Boles must do in August, needn't worry him, said
Martinez, the prosecutor who oversaw the FBI's handling of Boles.
"His story," Martinez said, "is true."
On a Saturday morning in January, that story, a refugee's story,
entered its final chapter as Boles stepped onto a Greyhound bus in
Brownsville. It took him north through Harlingen into the vast expanse
of Texas and then into America's heartland.
Forty-four hours and many stops later, the odyssey from Damascus to
Detroit ended at another Greyhound depot, and Boles began a new life.
--
News Researcher Julie Domel contributed to this report.