West Bloomfield couple targeted at border amid immigration ban tumult

When West Bloomfield immigration attorney Farah Al-khersan and her husband went to Canada on Friday night for dinner with her in-laws, they had expected a routine return trip back across the border at the Port Huron-Sarnia crossing.

But it was just a few hours after President Donald Trump had signed an executive order in which people with roots in seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq where Al-khersan and her husband were born, were targeted with certain travel restrictions. They had planned to spend the night and come home Saturday morning but after hearing about the order and getting e-mails from concerned friends and colleagues, they tried to return about 11 p.m. Friday. Al-khersan is a U.S. citizen, her husband is a permanent resident, here legally, from Canada.

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What Al-khersan said they encountered was about four hours of confusion and aggressive questioning from federal agents who stopped them and told them to exit their car, leaving the keys in it. At one point, Al-khersan said the agents banned them from re-entering the U.S. and told them to stay overnight in Canada and try again in the morning. But Al-khersan said she asserted her rights to reenter and agents then let them come back in at 3:30 a.m.

"It was upsetting to me," Al-khersan, 26, told the Free Press Saturday afternoon. "I was very shaken. I was very nervous. I was upset."

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Agents at the border were cordial, she said, but told her they were confused about Trump's order.

Al-khersan said the agents told her: "This is above our pay grade. It's all so new." At another point, Al-khersan said, an agent told them: "We don't know what's going on. The order is not clear."

Al-khersan said if she wasn't adamant about returning, she and her husband might have been stuck in Canada.

When Al-khersan was told to go back to Canada by agents, "I said, I'm sorry, I want it to be resolved now," she said. "If I didn't have the legal knowledge, if I didn't put my foot down until it was resolved, who knows what would have happened."

The Free Press contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron Saturday night, who directed inquiries about the couple’s experience to a Department of Homeland Security e-mail. Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, did not immediately respond about the incident Saturday night.

The incident sheds some light on how metro Detroiters are being affected by Trump's order on immigration and travel and reflects a growing concern across the state Saturday — from college campuses to neighborhoods — for the livelihood and civil rights of immigrants. At least three protests are planned Sunday in metro Detroit.

"It's just a shame that in this country, this is what's happening," said Al-khersan, who left Iraq in 1998 when she was eight-years-old. "We didn't flee persecution (in Iraq) to come here and be targeted all over again when we haven't done anything wrong."

She said there's a lot of uncertainty with the order and what happens after some of its rules expire in a few months.

"This could be the tip of the iceberg," Al-khersan said.

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Al-khersan said she is concerned that Trump's order could affect permanent residents and even U.S. citizens if they were born in Iraq, or any of the other six Muslim-majority countries the order cites. Metro Detroit has sizable immigrant populations with roots in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, three of the seven countries referred to in the order.

It's unclear how widespread the problem is in metro Detroit: A Detroit Metro Airport official referred calls on whether there were any detentions of passengers arriving Saturday to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did not return a call and e-mail. The Transportation Security Administration referred all questions to other federal departments including the Department of Homeland Security. A spokeswoman for DHS said Saturday the agency would comment later.

Ruby Robinson, supervising attorney of the Michigan Immigrants Rights Center in Kalamazoo, went Saturday to the tunnel entrance in downtown Detroit at the Detroit-Windsor border. He was trying to find out if anyone had been detained because of Trump's order, but was told by federal agents they could not release any information to him.

Robinson is advising immigrants from the seven countries listed in the executive order not to travel outside the U.S.

"There is a risk in departing the U.S. because they may not be allowed back in or find it very difficult to do so."

Southfield attorney Rebecca Robichaud, who represents Al-khersan, said, "There is a lot of fear, rightly so, from the immigrant community. My clients are confused about what the practical effects of the executive orders will be and as an immigration attorney all I can advise is don’t leave the country and call me if you are detained by immigration. They are now scared of what local police may do as there is a perception that local police forces will act as immigration officers. For my clients not even from those seven listed countries they too are scared because they see how discriminatory these executive orders are and fear it is only a matter of time before they too are targets of this hate."

Arab-American, Muslim, and other leaders expressed concern about Trump's order, saying it discriminates against Muslims by seeming to favor groups like Christians. The director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, Agustin Arbulu, released a statement late Saturday criticizing Trump's order, saying "that every person must be judged by the content of their character, not by the country of their origin." Catholic Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron also criticized Trump's executive order, saying Catholics "care for immigrants and refugees, no matter their religion or their country of origin."

Shereef Akeel, a Troy attorney, is cocounsel on a lawsuit planned to be filed on Monday in Virginia by the Council on American-Islamic Relations challenging the constitutionality of the executive order, saying it violates the idea of not favoring one religion over another.

"Our First Amendment is under attack," Akeel said. "You have an order that has expressed publicly its preference for one religion over another. Our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves. ... This order is unprecedented."

"This sets a dangerous precedent," since other religions could be targeted by the government in the future, Akeel said.

Others, though, say the order is needed to help minority populations being persecuted in the Middle East.

Martin Manna, head of the Chaldean Community Foundation in Sterling Heights, said that while he does not favor banning all Muslims, he supports the idea of prioritizing Christians since they are under siege in the Middle East and because the number of Christian refugees has decreased in recent years.

Manna also said there is precedent for the U.S. government favoring certain groups, such as Iraqi Shia Muslims during the 1990s and Somali refugees, most of whom are Muslim.

At the University of Michigan Saturday, President Mark Schlissel sent a message to the campus community seeking to reassure international and undocumented students of the university's support for them in the wake of Trump's executive order on immigration. Schlissel also said the university would not share immigration status unless required to do so by law.

At Oakland University, administrators also gathered Saturday morning to work on the issue.

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"We are currently focused on potential changes to immigration laws, policies and practices that could affect the status and safety of U-M students and personnel, particularly international students and those who may be undocumented," Schlissel said in his statement. "This includes several programs and policies that affect international students and faculty."

University officials said Schlissel's statement did not include any new policy, but instead was simply an effort to reassure its students.

U-M also said it would continue to push for the passage of the Bar Removal of Individuals who Dream and Grow our Economy Act, which would allow undocumented residents in the U.S. who arrived as children to stay in the country for another three years without the threat of deportation.

More than 1,400 U-M students, staff and faculty had signed an online petition by Saturday afternoon asking Schlissel to be a forceful advocate for immigrant and undocumented students.

At Michigan State University, the university has had a group monitoring the possibility of such an executive order being put in place for several weeks, spokesman Jason Cody told the Free Press. That group met again Friday after the order was signed.

“At this point we have sent a direct communication to all of those students from the affected countries, providing support and guidance,” Cody said. “We believe strongly in the benefits of a diverse and global student body and work force.”

Contact David Jesse: 313-222-8851 or djesse@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @reporterdavidj. Staff reporter Todd Spangler contributed to this report.

Rallies planned

DEARBORN: Protest, 1 p.m., Henry Ford Centennial Library on Michigan Ave.

HAMTRAMCK: Emergency Protest Hamtramck: We Stand in Solidarity with Muslims, 2-4 p.m., Hamtramck City Hall, 3401 Evaline.

DETROIT METRO AIRPORT: Muslim Ban Protest, 4-6 p.m. at International arrivals at the McNamara Terminal.

ANN ARBOR: Peaceful Protest Against Immigration Ban (and Everything Else), noon-3 p.m., Federal Building, 200 E. Liberty St.