Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 40 Iraqi Christians in Detroit on Sunday, including several Chaldeans, a Catholic minority group. Approximately 600,000 Chaldeans live in Iraq, where they have been relentlessly persecuted since 2003. The detained immigrants were taken to the Northeast Correctional Facility in Youngstown, Ohio, where they’ll await deportation proceedings, an attorney representing about 25 of the detainees told a local CBS affiliate.
Approximately 100 protesters attempted to block the buses containing the detainees from leaving yesterday, MLive reported. “All of us ran from Iraq because there were wars and we had no freedom,” Salman Maroof, a U.S.-born son of Chaldean immigrants told the outlet. “We came to this country for freedom.” Maroof said he voted for Trump in the presidential election, as did others in his community. “Hell yeah, I regret it,” he told the news outlet.
Last week, the House of Representatives unanimously voted in favor of a resolution declaring that ISIS's persecution of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, including Christians, constitutes genocide. Deporting the detained immigrants to Iraq is “like a death sentence,” Martin Manna, president of the Chaldean Community Foundation, told the Detroit Free Press.
“As a result of recent negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq, Iraq has recently agreed to accept a number of Iraqi nationals subject to orders of removal,” ICE said in a statement regarding the Detroit-area arrests, adding that all of the detained immigrants had prior convictions.
