Immigration Officials Say Afghan Woman Can Stay For Now
March 4th, 2005

By Robert Polner
Staff Writer


Samira Rahman (at left) of Levittown at home on Friday March 4, 2005. Behind her are her husband, Abdul Rahman and their sons Zikria, age 3, and Zaky, age 14 months.
(Newsday Photo / Jim Peppler)

Federal immigration officials took what they described as an extremely rare step Thursday night and released an Afghan mother from Long Island who was being held for deportation.

"I am so surprised, of course," said Samira Rahman, 30, who was reunited with her United States-born children, ages 1 and 2, and her husband, Abdul, a sidewalk food vendor in the Wall Street area.

In the 1990s, as Newsday first reported last month, Rahman's job as a secretary at Afghanistan's airline made her family a target of the Taliban. The regime kidnapped her father, whose fate remains unknown, and killed her brother, she said.

Rahman escaped to a Pakistan refugee camp in 1997, and made it to New York in 2001. But her bid for political asylum here, a status her husband won in the 1990s, was rejected in July, with immigration judges noting the Taliban was no longer in power.

Two months ago Rahman was jailed in Elizabeth, N.J., for deportation, having reneged on her court agreement to leave the country voluntarily.

As she waited behind bars, Rahman said, she dreaded her possible future in one of the numerous former jails the U.S.-backed Afghanistan government uses to shelter unescorted women and children from lingering Taliban factions known to harass and attack them.

But two weeks ago she signed papers permitting immigration officers to secure for her a passport and one-way plane ticket to Kabul. Letters of support from Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) seemed to fall on deaf ears, she said.

When guards came for her Thursday evening, Rahman said, she believed she was going to be taken to Newark Airport. "My heart fell," she remarked.
To her astonishment, she was freed.

Russ Knocke, public affairs director for the immigration agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said the release of people who've exhausted their appeals was "very rare."
He emphasized Rahman's case will be revisited by authorities in one year, when she might still face deportation. "I'm not going to comment on all the factors that were considered leading up to her relase," Knocke said. "She presents no public safety concern, certainly no national security concern. It's a very unique case."

Manizha Naderi, director of Women for Afghan Women, a 3-year-old advocacy group in Manhattan, said a national news network requested an interview with the detainee earlier this week. The immigration agency's concern about publicity, she added, probably touched off Rahman's release.

Knocke said the perception was false.