Attempted deportation of Palestinian man reveals tangled legal odyssey

By Karen DeYoung June 15 at 8:00 AM

When Palestinian Abdelhaleem Ashqar asked U.S. immigration officials here to reschedule a visit to their office earlier this month, noting he was recovering from knee surgery and that it was a Muslim holiday, his request was turned down.

But “we understand that it is the last day of Ramadan,” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official at the agency’s headquarters in Fairfax emailed Ashqar’s lawyer, Patrick Taurel. Ashqar would “be in and out quickly,” the agent said, and ICE merely needed additional paperwork related to postponement of his 16-year-old deportation order, which was under appeal.

When his worried family called Taurel that morning to say that Ashqar, 60, had been handcuffed at the ICE office, another senior officer told the lawyer by telephone that restraints were standard protocol to take him to a “secure” part of the facility to complete their business, and that Ashqar would be back at his Northern Virginia home in no time.

Even as more assurances were made over the next few hours, however, Ashqar was long gone. Just moments after being led away from his wife and son, he had been hustled out a separate door and driven by ICE agents, with a police escort, to Manassas Regional Airport. Shackled and in pain, by his own later account, he was helped up the stairs of a small executive jet that immediately took off for Israel and landed some 11 hours later in Tel Aviv.

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