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On
the night before Thanksgiving, Ibrahim Parlak and I
sat in the dining room of his Harbert, Mich.,
restaurant. Both of us kept watching the door. We
were prepared for the real possibility that at any
moment, federal agents might walk in and take him
away.
And so with every set of headlights that pulled into
his parking lot, Parlak braced himself. We'd stop
talking and wait to see who it was. And then pick up
again.
It was the most troubling Thanksgiving eve I can
remember. And for regular readers of this column it
might seem confusing since some months ago, things
seemed to be looking up for Parlak. Not now.
Tuesday, the Board of Immigration Appeals ignored
the clearly stated concerns of a federal judge in
Detroit and stubbornly stuck by the ruling of one
its own judges, reaffirming an order to deport
Ibrahim.
Welcome to the War on Terror and one of its
casualties.
I've been writing about Parlak, 43, for more than a
year now. He is the Turkish Kurd who came to the
United States in 1991 seeking political asylum. In
Turkey, he had been imprisoned and tortured because
he was part of the Kurdish resistance movement. The
Kurds seek a separate state. The organization to
which he belonged had ties to a group called PKK.
Once released from prison, he fled his homeland and
came here. Back then, the United States did not
consider PKK a terrorist organization and had every
reason to believe Parlak had, in fact, been
tortured. There was certainly no doubt he had been
arrested and imprisoned because he even gave his
immigration officer newspaper clips chronicling it.
Parlak settled in southwest Michigan in the small
town of Harbert, opened a modest Middle Eastern
restaurant, fell in love, and had a daughter named
Livia, who today is 8. He has been, by all accounts,
not only a devoted father but a law-abiding,
civic-minded, taxpaying, active member of his
community.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001. And in its wake the
Department of Homeland Security's re-examination of
Parlak. His association, years earlier, with the PKK,
which the United States in 1997 re-classified as a
terrorist group, suddenly transformed Parlak into a
terrorist. And immigration officials charged he had
lied in seeking political asylum because he had
never informed them of his arrest in Turkey.
(Question: How did they suppose Parlak ended up in a
Turkish prison unless somebody arrested him first?)
In July of 2004, Parlak was arrested by the FBI.
Five months later, an immigration judge ordered him
deported.
The little towns surrounding Harbert rose up and
rallied for Parlak's release. A team of lawyers,
some working for free, fought relentlessly in his
behalf. In June of this year, after more than 10
months in jail, Parlak was released on bond by U.S.
District Court Judge Avern Cohn in Detroit. The
judge questioned the motives of the government and
hailed Parlak as ''a model immigrant.''
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security was
still barreling ahead in its own immigration courts
trying to deport Parlak.
The Bush administration, as we know, has a problem
with admitting mistakes when it comes to the war on
terror. Parlak's case is one of them. The Department
of Homeland Security oversees immigration matters,
and immigration judges are not part of an
independent judiciary; they answer to the U.S.
attorney general. It's like a prosecutor picking his
own judge and jury.
As a result, no matter what a U.S. district court
judge said, Parlak is back in jeopardy until his
lawyers can get his case back into federal court
where some independent thought can be applied to
this.
The timing of all of this is suspicious. The Board
of Immigration Appeals gave the government its
ruling on Tuesday. But Parlak's attorney, Jay
Marhoefer, didn't receive it until Wednesday, too
late to get a brief written and into the 6th Circuit
Court of Appeals before it shut down for the
four-day holiday.
"Why we didn't get a copy (Tuesday), I don't know,''
said Marhoefer from his Chicago office. ''I leave it
to people to form their own opinion.''
Two Michigan politicians have a strong opinion and
urgently expressed it to Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff in a letter written Wednesday. Sen.
Carl Levin, a liberal Democrat, and Rep. Fred Upton,
a conservative Republican, called the decision to
deport Parlak ''extremely unjust.'' They pledged to
introduce what's called a ''private bill'' in
Congress to stop the government from punishing
''this model immigrant over activities he disclosed
in his application for asylum.''
''This is my community,'' Parlak told me, ''on a sad
day, on a happy day.''
Parlak should not have to spend another day staring
at the door waiting for federal agents to snatch him
away. He lives in America.
Free Ibrahim.
www.suntimes.com
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