(photo by Jessica Roberts)
American Girl
by Moustafa Bayoumi
Rasha is a petite five foot four.
She walks with a feather step and looks at you with penetrating
obsidian eyes. Her lips are often lightly glossed in pink, and
her serious brown hair is commonly tied in a librarian’s bun.
She’s fine-boned, with features as brittle and hard as
porcelain: If you drop her, she’ll break, but she’ll cut you,
too. She’s tough and tender, enraged and exhausted, withdrawn
and outgoing, a pessimist brimming with hope.
She has lived in the United States for more than eighteen years,
almost all of them in Brooklyn. Rasha was born in 1983, in
Damascus, Syria, but when she was 5 years old, her family was
granted a tourist visa to the United States, and they moved from
the Fertile Crescent to Avenue U in Gravesend. At the time,
Syria under Hafez al-Assad was anything but fertile. Bombings
against the regime were frequent, as were mass arrests and
torture, culminating in the 1982 massacre of thousands in the
city of Hama.
As soon as the family arrived in the United States, Rasha’s
father applied for residency. He also began working at a
discount clothing store on 14th Street in Manhattan, eventually
becoming a partner.
Rasha’s mother taught her how to be a proper Arab Muslim girl in
the United States. As her parents were not particularly
religious, the lessons revolved less around theology than
values: honesty, compassion, and protection of her honor. She
had three siblings—Reem, an older sister; Munir, an older
brother; and Wassim, a younger brother. None of them was much of
a model for Rasha. Reem was five years older, a large
differential at that age. The two girls fought often.
The family stayed in the New York area until 1996, still without
having adjusted their immigration status. The residency
application had been unsuccessful, but Rasha’s father had hired
a lawyer and was appealing the decision. Meanwhile, her mother
had given birth to two more little brothers. Since they were
born in Brooklyn, the two infant boys were, unlike the rest of
the family, citizens of the United States. But the immigration
proceedings were stalled, and Rasha’s father gave up and moved
them back to Syria that year.
Rasha had just finished sixth grade, and she found her new
environs hard going. She spoke Arabic but could not read and
write in the language, so school was difficult. Outside class,
she would repeat to her school friends what she heard at home
about Syria’s dear president, and their mouths would drop. “You
never, ever, ever say anything about the president,” they
whispered. She became even more pro-American, seeing with a
teenage girl’s perspective the importance of things like freedom
of speech and basic human rights. She realized how much she had
taken for granted. She missed her American life.
After a couple of months, Rasha’s father received word from his
American lawyer that the family finally had an interview
scheduled for their green-card application. They were approved
for a visa to visit the United States, which felt like a
miracle. Back in Brooklyn, Rasha was again happy. This is what
she knew. This was home.
James Madison High School was good for Rasha. The redbrick
school, set in a prosperous area of Midwood, with its large
houses and green lawns, has an elegant exterior even though the
windows are caged and you need to pass through a metal detector
to get in. It also has a quote from President Madison carved on
its edifice. “Education,” it reads, “is the true foundation of
civil liberty.”
At Madison, Rasha met her best friends, Gaby and Nicky. Gaby is
from Ecuador, Nicky from Azerbaijan. The three of them became
inseparable. When they weren’t in school, they were everywhere
else—on the subway to Manhattan, at one another’s houses, at the
movies, shopping, or eating. By the spring of 2001, when Rasha
graduated from Madison, her father had saved enough money to buy
a place in Bay Ridge, with its limestone row houses and numerous
Arabs. This was the first property the family had owned, and her
parents were very proud of the accomplishment. Two Egyptian
tenants lived in their basement apartment. Rasha started college
in September 2001.
͌
On the morning of September 11,
2001, Rasha was sleeping late. Her mother opened her bedroom
door and peeked in. “Rasha,” she said. “You can’t go to school.
The subway’s not working.” Half-asleep, Rasha raised her head.
“Why?” she asked. “Accident,” her mother explained, shrugging
her shoulders. “With a plane.” Rasha went back to sleep.
Several months later, in February 2002, in the middle of the
night, Rasha was shaken awake by a woman in a uniform who told
her to get dressed. Oh my God, Rasha thought,
somebody’s died, and she felt her heart drop and crack. She
immediately glanced over to her sister. “What the hell’s going
on?” she asked, but Reem just looked frightened. Shock and fear
paralyzed Rasha, and her knees locked. “Ma’am, just get up,”
repeated the female officer. “Get up and get dressed.”
Disoriented, Rasha forced herself to slowly rise. She walked
downstairs in her pajamas, a few steps behind her sister.
In the living room, she saw her entire family sitting awkwardly
on the couch, and she sighed with relief. But then she noticed
that her brother Munir’s legs were shackled. Shock turned to
confusion as she realized that about fifteen law-enforcement
officers—INS officials, U.S. Marshals, and FBI agents—had taken
over their residence. The strangers, some with guns, walked
through her house as if they owned it. Out the window she saw
that it was the lights from their vehicles that had been shining
into the living room.
An FBI agent, the apparent leader of the group, stood in front
of the family and told them they were being investigated for
possible terrorist connections and that they could be deported,
possibly in as little as two or three days. At this point,
Rasha’s mother became frantic, crying and screaming out
questions. But he just reiterated monotonously that everything
would be explained to them at Federal Plaza.
This was no accidental arrest. The man seemed to know everything
about the family, including the fact that Rasha’s two youngest
brothers, both minors, were U.S. citizens. He told Rasha’s
father to arrange custody for them. Rasha’s father suggested his
brother, who lives in New York, and asked if he could call him
and wait until he arrived. That would take too long, the agent
said, and instructed him instead to leave the boys with the
tenants below. When they were ready to go, the agent turned to
the entire family and said, “We’re going to handcuff you now.”
(Later, Rasha learned why her eldest brother had already been
shackled. When an agent went to his downstairs bedroom to wake
him, Munir was uncooperative. “Why?” he kept asking. “Come on,
get up,” the agent said. “Why?” “Just get up,” the man repeated,
and Munir asked why again. “Get up!” the agent yelled. “Get up
and put your hands together, like the way you pray!” Munir swore
at him and told him to get the hell away. “So they shackled
him,” Rasha told me, “you know, to tame him.”)
Outside, the official vehicles had closed off the entire street.
The agents shepherded the family into a van. The ride to
Manhattan’s Federal Plaza was bumpy and disorienting, affording
them no view of the road. When the van stopped and the back
doors eventually swung open, they were all pulled from the
vehicle into the building, led to a room, and then searched and
fingerprinted before being dumped in a holding cell.
Eventually, each family member was taken to a separate room for
questioning. The interrogators asked Rasha very specific
questions: Where was she on X day? When did she go to
Y place? As she gave her answers, she realized that
they knew what she was going to say. After a few minutes, they
even seemed to be feeding her the answers to their questions.
That night, her father led a prayer, and the women covered their
hair as best they could. When the authorities came back in the
morning, her father pleaded with them. Enough of this, he said.
Just deport us. But the FBI man wouldn’t hear it. We are turning
you over to the INS, he said. You have to be investigated, and
you will be held in detention in the meantime. Another agent
told them in more private tones that they should have expected
to be arrested at a time like this and that they would have a
better life over there. Rasha glared at him. We’re cleaning out
the country, he seemed to be saying, and you’re the dirt.
They learned that they’d all be going to a facility in New
Jersey, except for Wassim, who was under 18 and thus bound for a
juvenile-detention center in Pennsylvania. Being split up was a
fresh horror. Through her own waterlogged eyes, Rasha watched
her family collapse in tears.
At the jail in Bergen County, Rasha and her mother and sister
were strip-searched and photographed before being taken to a
filthy and overcrowded holding area. Everybody seemed nasty or
catatonic. This is just like prison on television,
Rasha thought. A corrections officer opened the door and told
them to get inside. The door locked behind them.
After six hours, they were herded into another holding cell,
teeming with even more people, where they would stay for two
days. Rasha’s mother raged and yelled until she was able to
place a call to her brother-in-law about her youngest sons.
Rasha, Reem, and their mother were eventually moved again, to a
larger wing of the facility, where they were again
strip-searched, then given beige jumpsuits and black-and-white
Converse-style shoes and assigned to cells. The INS official who
had told them at Federal Plaza that they would be deported
within days was clearly wrong. When they joined the general
population, Rasha realized with dread, they were going to stay
for a while.
