We’ve Officially Entered Kafka’s America

Three weeks ago, Helen Parsonage, a North Carolina immigration attorney, received a call from a Greensboro community member informing her that unidentified government agents were trying to grab an immigrant father of five from out of his home.

The man the agents wanted to arrest was a 50-year-old Libyan asylum seeker named Mohamed Naser. Fifteen years ago, Naser entered the country legally and applied for asylum. He has been going through the court process ever since and has a work permit. On the day in question, he was working for a contractor who fixed kitchen appliances for the Wendy’s fast-food chain.

Naser’s only previous involvement with the law came nearly a decade ago, when he was pulled over on a traffic stop and issued three tickets, for expired registration and insurance, and for not wearing a seatbelt. The tickets were ultimately dismissed, Parsonage says. But in an era in which ICE and CBP agents are operating under Stephen Miller’s orders (which the DOJ denies are actually orders) to meet arrest quotas of upwards of 3,000 immigrants per day nationwide, it is presumably those dismissed tickets that were enough to bring the father to their attention.

The agents, in plainclothes and with no identification, first approached Naser’s house at 9 am on July 15. He was out at work, so the men reportedly told his wife that they would return with reinforcements. When Naser came back for his lunch break, agents wearing camo outfits adorned with the block letters “Police” lunged toward him. Naser, who had read multiple reports of criminals impersonating ICE teams in the months since Trump’s inauguration, was terrified and made a dash for the safety of his house. He made it inside, but when he and his wife tried to slam the door, an agent secured a foothold, keeping his boot in the opening to stop them from being able to fully close it. For more than an hour, as neighbors poured into the street to film the standoff, the agents attempted to force their way into the house, even though they apparently had no warrant that would allow them to enter the property legally in pursuit of Naser. Finally, they gave up and left.

Two days later, however, the snatch-and-grab crew had more luck, finding Naser on one of his work routes, as he headed toward a Wendy’s. They arrested and detained him.

An ICE agent contacted Parsonage and told her that his superiors had ordered him to ask Naser a series of questions about his knowledge of, and involvement with, Iranian government covert operations in the United States and overseas, and about plans the Iranian leadership might have to shut the Straits of Hormuz in the aftermath of the recent US and Israeli bombings of Iran.

Time and again, Parsonage, who was present for the interrogation, explained that her client was Libyan, not Iranian, that he had never been to Iran, and that he didn’t know anything about the country. Each time, the agent reportedly responded to her that he understood this but that he and his colleagues were under orders to ask detainees these questions. At the end of the interview, the attorney told the presiding ICE officer that since they clearly had the wrong man, her client should now be released.

The officer’s answer shocked Parsonage. In a truly Kafkaesque turn of phrase, she says that he informed her that once ICE or the CBP had an immigrant in their possession, they would not let him or her go, even if they had been arrested on a misunderstanding, as was apparently the case here. Instead, once the interrogation was over, they would transfer Naser to a detention facility.