Detroit Police Captain Darrell Patterson stands between deportation protesters and traffic in downtown Detroit, Mich. Photo courtesy of Detroit Free Press/Allie Gross
ishtartv.com - gazette.com
By:
Lauren Markoe, RNS, June 15, 2017
(RNS)
Some Chaldeans and their supporters are wondering why more Christian Americans
— their co-religionists — are not speaking out against the impending
deportation of hundreds of them from the U.S. to Iraq, which many liken to a
“death sentence.”
About 200 Chaldeans — members of a group of Christians indigenous to Iraq —
were rounded up by ICE agents in past weeks, including 114 in the Detroit area
last weekend.
Martin Manna, president of the Chaldean Community Foundation, based in Sterling
Heights, Mich., said he’s frustrated by evangelicals and others who have
expressed outrage over the persecution of Christians in the Middle East but who
have been silent about the Chaldeans who face deportation.
“They could be doing a lot more,” he said. “They could be saying, ‘Wait, we
have been fighting to protect these people in their ancestral lands and now we
are sending them back to those areas that we’re not doing enough to protect?'”
He pointed to evangelicals such as Franklin Graham, president of the Billy
Graham Evangelistic Association, who held a summit in Washington last month to
rally support for Middle Eastern Christians he called victims of genocide.
“They came to D.C., a whole bunch of them,” said Manna. “They brought up the
issue that needed to be brought up, but we’re not seeing the follow-up. If they
can’t stand up for the people who already made it here, then how can they stand
up for the ones in the Middle East?”
Graham this week had not spoken out about the Chaldeans in custody until
Thursday (June 15), when he issued a statement after an inquiry from RNS.
“I find it very disturbing what I have read about Chaldean Christians being
rounded up by ICE for possible deportation. I would encourage the president to
have someone investigate these cases thoroughly,” Graham said in a statement.
“I understand a policy of deporting people who are here illegally and have
broken the law,” Graham’s statement continued. “I don’t know all of the
details, but I would encourage our president to give great consideration to the
threat to lives of Christians in countries like Iraq.”
Philippe Nassif, executive director of In Defense of Christians, a
Washington-based group that seeks to protect persecuted Christians in the
Middle East, said he was glad Graham felt moved to speak out.
But Nassif said there should have been more of an outcry when news broke of the
Chaldeans’ plight.
Although the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization and a
longtime ally of the Chaldeans, is circulating a letter on their behalf, “we
aren’t seeing a lot of these other larger voices in the community standing up
for the Iraqi Christians,” Nassif said.
“If all these people really care about these communities in the Middle East,
they should also be caring about the communities that are living here in the
United States that are being sent back,” he said.
Another group that has taken a stand on behalf of the Chaldeans: the American
Civil Liberties Union. It filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in
Detroit on Thursday to halt the deportations.
Some of the Chaldeans detained by ICE have committed crimes, but their families
say those offenses were often nonviolent and happened decades ago. The convicted
have served their time and have become productive members of society on whom
their families depend, they say.
A Department of Homeland Security representative defended the government’s
actions.
“The agency recently arrested a number of Iraqi nationals, all of whom had
criminal convictions for crimes including homicide, rape, aggravated assault,
kidnapping, burglary, drug trafficking, robbery, sex assault, weapons
violations and other offenses,” DHS spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a
statement.
“Each of these individuals received full and fair immigration proceedings,
after which a federal immigration judge found them ineligible for any form of
relief under U.S. law and ordered them removed.”
Advocacy groups and the U.S. government have for years documented the danger to
Christians living in Iraq, whose numbers have plummeted to less than 200,000
from a high of 1.2 million before the Iraq War. Many died during the conflict
and hundreds of thousands fled to safer lands. Today Iraqi Christians sit in
the crosshairs of the group known as the Islamic State, which is losing
territory but still active in Iraq.
More than a year ago Congress and the State Department, under then-Secretary of
State John Kerry, recognized the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East as
a genocide.
“This is not complicated,” said Thomas Farr, director of the Religious Freedom
Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World
Affairs. “Iraqi Christians have formally been designated by the United States
as victims of ‘genocide.’ They and other named minorities of that declaration
should be welcomed to this country. Those who have made it here already should
not be deported.”
Chaldeans are Eastern Rite Catholics, who affiliate with the Roman Catholic
Church but have their own bishops and patriarch. They believe their ancestors
were converted to Christianity by Thomas the Apostle.
The largest groups of Chaldeans reside in Iraq and Syria. In the U.S.,
population estimates range in the hundreds of thousands, with more than 100,ooo
living in Greater Detroit, where many began to immigrate in the 1920s.
“On a practical level, this is mind-boggling,” said Nina Shea, an international
human-rights lawyer who runs the Center for Religious Freedom at the Washington-based
Hudson Institute. She can’t think of a safe destination for the Chaldeans in
Iraq.
“The director of Homeland Security — does he know that there has been a
genocide declared there by the United States? Had anyone told him? Does ICE
know this?” Shea said.
“In a situation of genocide you don’t deport anybody. We didn’t even deport
Gitmo detainees to places where they would be killed.”
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