When Azizullah received notice from the Department of Homeland Security for a required check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in December, he feared the worst.
“I was thinking, if they arrest me and send me back to Afghanistan,” he said. “Maybe I [will] lose my life.”
His family had worked for U.S. companies and government contractors. When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they began targeting those who had sided against them. Azizullah arrived in the U.S. two years later and applied for asylum. We’re only using his first name because of retaliation he might face for sharing his story.
Unlike some asylum seekers, Azizullah had never been asked to check in with ICE before, and he had a clean record. Instead of sending him back home, ICE officers detained Azizullah and sent him to the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Mich.
Although he hadn’t won his initial case for asylum, a judge had granted Azizullah withholding of removal — meaning he couldn’t be deported back to Afghanistan — and his lawyers had appealed his case. Azizullah also recently married a U.S. citizen, which opened another pathway toward legal status.
Sam Kulhanek, an attorney with the Michigan Immigrants Right Center, said she explained that to ICE officers and asked why he was being detained.
“The answer was just kind of, you know, ‘we have orders from headquarters,’” she recalled. “So it seemed very targeted.”
Kulhanek felt the check-in and detention were part of a crackdown on Afghan immigrants, especially since the notice letter was issued on December 1 — just days after another Afghan asylum seeker shot two national guardsmen in Washington, D.C., killing one of them.
President Donald Trump said the killing of National Guardsman Sarah Beckstrom underscored “the single greatest national security threat facing our nation."
“We're not going to put up with these kinds of assaults on law and order by people who shouldn't even be in our country,” he said in televised remarks on Thanksgiving Day last year. “We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan who has entered our country under Biden and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country."
“Mandatory detention”
At the time, lawyers had only just started to file habeas petitions for people in immigration detention to compel the federal government to provide a reason why it was holding someone, or else to release them.
About six weeks after he was taken to North Lake, Kulhanek filed a petition for habeas corpus. The Trump administration’s policy of detaining people without permanent legal status — even those with pending asylum cases like Azizullah — made habeas one of the only ways out of immigration detention.
Lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security argued against Azizullah’s release, but didn’t offer any reasons specific to him. Instead, the agency outlined the same rationale for the Trump administration’s “mandatory detention” policy that it had in many other cases.
Federal Court Judge Jane M. Beckering granted Azizullah the lowest possible bond.
“That just showed me,” said Kulhanek, “That this was somebody who never should have been detained in the first place.”
After about two months in immigration detention, Azizullah returned home to his wife in Metro Detroit — but he’s still in limbo.
Trump had already banned travel from several countries including Afghanistan. The administration also put a pause on processing green cards and citizenship ceremonies for people from several countries. This summer, a judge ruled that pause is illegal, but the Trump administration hasn’t lifted it.
The changing policies between one administration and the next made Azizullah think of the new laws the Taliban imposed since they took power.
“You cannot predict anything,” he said. “[A] new government [means] new policies, new rules, new laws, and every day you should be updated. Otherwise you [won’t] know what is going on.
Hopes dashed by the Taliban
Azizullah had never thought about leaving Afghanistan. He had tried to respond with positivity to the loss and fear he faced.
After his sister was killed in a 2017 bombing of a test-prep center, Azizullah’s family started a library to honor her memory and encourage other girls to keep studying. In 2020, when an ISIS-claimed attack on his university took the lives of more than 20, including several of his classmates, Azizullah started a cycling club. He wanted to remind people of the beauty of their country — but he also had a more personal motivation. The club gave him a platform to connect with different people and to learn about the challenges they faced so he could figure out ways to address them.
“All those activities which I was doing,” he explained, were a way to “get more and more [connected] with the people and get going to be a Senator.”
But his hope to run for public office came crashing down when the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
“That was so hard for me,” he said. “I was thinking about my dream.” All of it felt finished.
Creating a new village
When he heard that the Biden administration had launched an app to make it easier for people like him to apply for asylum, Azizullah figured it was his chance to try and start over. He put in his application and moved to Michigan because he had an old friend in the state, one whose family was from the same village as Azizullah’s.
It didn’t take long for him to start his own village. He married his friend’s sister. Then, his brother and sister-in-law also moved to Michigan.
This summer, Azizullah and his new bride celebrated their wedding reception with hundreds of people. He hopes they can take a honeymoon, but likely won’t be going abroad until his asylum case is settled.
“But for now, I cannot plan to travel, but I hope that one day we can travel all over the world,” he said. “And we can help each other to make a better society.”
Azizullah wanted to run for public office in Afghanistan. Now, he’s focused on doing whatever good he can here in Michigan.
![An editorial collage combining a black-and-white photograph of the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building, home to the Detroit Immigration Court, with colorful torn-paper fragments of text clipped from immigration court bond hearing documents. The scraps — in pink, blue, and green — display partial phrases including "Granted" (with a checked checkbox), "Denied" (with a checked checkbox), "a flight risk," "Respondent is a flight risk," "the Immigration Judge denied Pe[titioner]," "(ICE), released Petit[ioner]," "under bond of $5,000," "bond of $15,000, with," and "Denied, because." The overlapping fragments visually contrast bond grants and denials, evoking the bureaucratic and high-stakes nature of immigration detention proceedings.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c57a8e5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x1070+0+5/resize/560x312!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F75%2F7b%2Fa875b7d043b4b67d5862f5501af5%2Fbond-headers-5.png)
