Summer 2008

Having received death threats for cooperating with American forces in Iraq, Saman Kareem Ahmad, a Kurd who worked as a translator for four years with U.S. Marines, was admitted to the United States on a special visa in 2006. Buoyed by recommendations from the likes of General David Petraeus, he has spent the last two years at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia, preparing Marines for what awaits them in Iraq. In February, however, the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services summarily denied his application for a green card. The reason? A bizarre rule that has transformed the quest for refugee admission, asylum approval, or permanent residence into an unending nightmare. That Ahmad had once served with the militia of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), a group that fought a long guerrilla action against Saddam Hussein’s government, was his Catch 22: because it had taken up arms against an established government, the KDP was regarded as a “terrorist organization.” No matter that it was Saddam’s government and that the U.S. covertly supported the KDP’s actions and that the KDP now belongs to a coalition that has seats in the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad. Having been part of a “terrorist organization,” Ahmad was out in the cold.

The Ahmad case was saturated with such absurdity that when Karen DeYoung wrote about it in the Washington Post, it sparked a minor furor among government officials as well as a general readership. In response, the U.S. immigration service announced that it would temporarily suspend the denial of green cards to refugees and other applicants with ties to groups that had battled foreign dictatorships. But human rights groups and refugee agencies suspect that once the emotions stirred by the callous treatment of a man who had risked everything for the U.S. war effort have cooled, the status quo will be restored and the wall rebuilt.

The story of Saman Ahmad counts as exceptional only in the controversy it has generated. Indeed, my notebooks from two years of interviewing refugees, many of whom aided the United States abroad but were themselves denied entry to the U.S., overflow with similar tales. Frigid bureaucratic letters identical to the one Ahmad received were also dispatched to an Iraqi who joined the uprising against Saddam Hussein in Basra in 1991; a Burmese lawyer who smuggled anti-regime brochures from Thailand; a Sudanese man admitted to the U.S. as a refugee and now charged with having been a private in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) when he was seven years old; and an Afghan limousine driver in New York who at the age of twelve distributed literature on behalf of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, an organization that no longer exists and many of whose former leaders now hold high offices in the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Anna Husarska is senior policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee.

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