Nada Alkhaddar, shown with her son Mohamed in their North Side apartment, is struggling to get a green card for her husband.
Ahmed Alrais, center with back to camera, in an undated photo from Iraq, where he works as an interpreter for the Army.
CHICAGO — Nada Alkhaddar spends her days at the Muslim Women Resource Center helping refugees and immigrants deal with government and commercial bureaucracies that can make life in the United States seem about as easy as computing the Alternative Minimum Tax.
“We help anyone, Muslims or Christians, from here or anywhere in the city,” Ms. Alkhaddar said as she guided an Eastern European man through a long questionnaire from a local bank. She adjusted her hijab and smiled as she worked in an office overlooking Devon and Western Avenues, an Indo-Pakistani neighborhood just north and west of downtown.
Despite her skills at navigating the obstacles immigrants face, Ms. Alkhaddar cannot seem to help the person closest to her and her three children — her husband, Ahmed Alrais — who is trying to get a green card.
Mr. Alrais came to the United States in the spring of 2008 after his life had been threatened for working as an interpreter for the United States Army in Iraq. Unable to find a job during the recession and without a green card, he returned in February to the country he had fled to work again for the Army through a private contractor.
Federal officials at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, will not give Mr. Alrais credit for the time he has spent on a United States military base overseas so he can fulfill an American residency requirement to get the green card. His application was denied in November.
Mr. Alrais, 51, struggles to understand a system that would have given him a green card if he had stayed in the United States for the full year without a job, instead of working with American forces in Iraq.
“That’s confusing; that’s very confusing,” Mr. Alrais said Wednesday via Skype from northern Iraq. “We get hit by mortars, like, I don’t know, once or twice a month, and when we go out, we don’t know when we are going to be attacked, and sacrificing being here away from our families.”
Despite the turmoil and political controversy over how easily some immigrants enter the United States illegally, Mr. Alrais’s experience shows how formidable the challenges can be for many refugees and immigrants — even those with families in the United States and seemingly solid credentials.
“He serves the country with his life in such a dangerous place,” said Ms. Alkhaddar, 50, who keeps a purple folder full of government papers relating to her husband’s case at her apartment on Chicago’s North Side.
The folder contains documents like their marriage license, as well as letters of recommendation from Mr. Alrais’s military supervisors in Iraq.
“He has been very supportive of our presence, helped our soldiers and has been a loyal friend to us,” said Maj. James B. Phillips of the Army in one letter, which also described Mr. Alrais as “trustworthy and dependable.” Major Phillips worked with Mr. Alrais in 2003.
In an e-mail message this week from Iraq, Major Philips said Mr. Alrais was an outstanding interpreter whom he highly respected.
“The troops and I also liked him because when we first met he had a Mustang that he would drive to work every now and then,” the major said. “It was always nice to see a classic American car while deployed.”
Fred Tsao, policy director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Mr. Alrais’s ordeal to secure a green card was “crazy.”
“To go back and face the dangers while serving this country and then be denied a green card seems really unfair,” Mr. Tsao said. “It’s an awful deterrence to making a contribution to the country that took you in. Something is terribly wrong here.”
Ms. Alkhaddar and Mr. Alrais fled their home in Baghdad in 2006 after his work for the United States Army in 2003 and 2004 made him a target for Iraqis angered by the invasion.
“A lot of people were assassinated just because they had a contract working with the U.S. forces,” Mr. Alrais said.
A grocer refused to sell food to his youngest son, Mohamed. “He said, ‘We will never sell anything for you because of your father,’ ” Ms. Alkhaddar said. “He came home crying. They start kidnapping people. For our safety we moved.”
The family went to Egypt for two years, where they lived in a compound called Beverly Hills outside Cairo. They came to the United States as refugees in May 2008, as the recession was hitting the American job market.
Even though Mr. Alrais had the proper documentation for a refugee and was a chef trained in France, he could not find a good job in Chicago to support his family. He left the United States in February to work in Iraq as an interpreter with Global Linguist Solutions, a contractor based in Virginia that provides translators to the American military.
Mr. Alrais’s wife and children stayed behind, planning to apply for citizenship for the family after they had met the residency requirement of one year. May was their one-year anniversary, and Ms. Alkhaddar and the children were given green cards. But Mr. Alrais’s application was denied.
In a letter to Mr. Alrais in November, Donald P. Ferguson, the Chicago field office director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Mr. Alrais had not met the residency requirement because he had not been in the United States for a full year after he arrived. Because of his work with the military in Iraq, he was away from Feb. 19 until Sept. 11, 2009.
Mr. Ferguson wrote that being on an American territory on a military base in Iraq did not count toward residency. “The service is unable to consider your time working in Iraq to fulfill the physical presence requirement for adjustment of status purposes,” he wrote.
Mr. Ferguson cited another problem with the application: Mr. Alrais had given his power of attorney to his wife so she could apply for the green card for him while he was overseas. Ms. Alkhaddar submitted an Internal Revenue Service form showing she held his power of attorney, but the Department of Homeland Security does not accept that form as sufficient proof of power of attorney, Mr. Ferguson said.
Mr. Ferguson did not return phone calls requesting comment. Marilu Cabrera, an agency spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on any specific cases.
Thomas Ragland, an immigration lawyer in Washington who previously worked for the Department of Justice and the Board of Immigration Appeals, said the immigration system could be impossible for the average person to handle.
“Even some average lawyers out there are not very good at navigating it,” Mr. Ragland said, “even though they charge for it.”
Mr. Ragland said Mr. Alrais, who plans to come to Chicago later this month to plead his case, deserved an advocate to help him get a green card, considering how members of Congress and the military had spoken about the importance of taking care of Iraqis who aid the armed forces.
Ms. Alkhaddar keeps in touch with her husband over her computer at home, telling him how the children are doing.
Their oldest son, Amro, 27, is a mechanic on Chicago’s South Side. Their daughter, Shahad, 21, is an interior design student at Harrington College downtown. Their youngest son, Mohamed, is a sophomore at Mather High School, where he plays football.
Mohamed, 17, dreams of being a Chicago policeman. “For America,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment