Activist says if they are deported to Iraq they will be killed

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

A planned protest Wednesday over Iraqi Chaldean Christians from the Detroit area, who are being detained at a private prison in Youngstown pending deportation to the Middle East, did not happen.

But organizer Maron Yousif said he is not giving up. He is from Farmington Hills, Mich., where Christian prisoners were rounded up by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau.

“We tried to protest. For some reason, the United States does not want us. Why, I don’t know,” said Yousif during a telephone interview. He estimated that 150 Chaldean Christians are incarcerated in the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center.

“As of now, we are trying to find other solutions. We are a very peaceful people. We are just trying to get our rights back. The United States is going to send us off to be murdered,” he said.

“We don’t want to go back to Iraq. I am Catholic. I hope that if they are deported, it is to someplace safer. Otherwise, they are going to send us off to be murdered,” said Yousif.

When asked if he was exaggerating the fate of those deported to Iraq, he said: “That’s 100 percent accurate. If they get sent to the Middle East, they will die.”

“Terrorist groups have been stripping us of our rights and killing us for years. That’s what we have witnessed in the past ... that’s the reason we are in America in the first place. This is a Catholic Holocaust. They do not want us to co-exist,” he said.

Yousif said that as a group of people, they have not stopped taking action. Churches have gotten together to find solutions. “We’ll exhaust all of our resources hoping for a good outcome,” he said.

A statement from ICE said that under the provisions of recent negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq, Iraq agreed to accept a number of Iraqi nationals subject to orders of removal. The agency also said a number of the Iraqi nationals had been convicted of crimes including homicide, rape, aggravated assault, kidnapping, burglary, drug trafficking, robbery, sex assault and weapons violations.

Yousif said people signed papers not knowing what they signed. “This is the result,” he said.