Painful odyssey, uncertain fate

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, May 7, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.

The neighborhood Dallal Muhamed lives in is like her life.

Near her house in the stretches of Mountain's Edge is a lot losing dust to the wind, the skeleton of another house, some homes where the last roof tile was laid a week ago and a few houses with families unloading groceries from the car.

There's an air of instability, the not-yet-ready, the soon-to-arrive, the just-left, the settling in.

Muhamed has lived like this for 14 years, moving from Baghdad to Yemen, Munich, Tijuana and finally Las Vegas. She has been a civil engineer, a secretary, a real estate agent and a card dealer in a casino, all while raising a son and daughter.

Soon, she may have to pick up again, if immigration authorities deport her to Iraq - the country she fled after being raped, she says, by a gang member with ties to one of Saddam Hussein's sons.

Muhamed, who last month lost her bid to stay in this country in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, would be one of the very few people the U.S. government has sent back to Iraq in recent years. Over the past three fiscal years, 38 Iraqis have been deported, 13 of them criminals, according to federal authorities.

Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the Department of Homeland Security "is still trying to develop a procedure" with the Iraqi government on deportations and is reviewing the issue case by case.

The situation confronting Muhamed is two-edged, observers say.

Sending someone to a country at war, especially when the U.S. is involved, is "extremely troubling," said Kareem Shora, national director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Shora said his organization has spoken with the White House about granting Iraqis so-called temporary protected status, meaning they could legally stay in the U.S. until the situation changes in Iraq. But no decision has been made on the proposal, he said.

But not deporting Muhamed to Iraq also could pose problems, because it would mean that the federal government is admitting that the situation in Iraq is dangerous, which runs contrary to the notion that the U.S. military is building a safe democracy, said David Leopold, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and an expert on immigration from the Mideast.

Muhamed's erratic course started with what could be described as a government-sponsored rape.

Though she was Sunni, Saddam's religion, she would not join the former Iraqi leader's Baath party. She says a member of a gang linked to Odday, one of Saddam's sons, raped her.

Michael A. Newton, acting associate clinical professor of law at Vanderbilt University of Law and an expert on Iraq, said the former Iraqi leader used rape to terrorize his country's citizens for at least a decade beginning in the 1980s. Members of Saddam's government even had business cards that read, "security rapists," Newton said.

Muhamed now speaks slowly because of Bell's palsy brought on by stress. Sitting on a leather sofa in her neat house with Iraqi beads and cloths draped on a coffee table, she refers to the rape obliquely at first - "Something happened." Then she offers piecemeal details.

Fearing that her husband would kill her because of his shame, or at least take away her boy, Mustafa, and her little girl, Dalyia, the 35-year-old then-civil engineer paid off Iraqi border officials one day in September 1993. The three of them escaped to Sanaa, Yemen. But they never found a way to legalize their status there and left three years later.

Muhamed and her school-age children boarded a plane with 10 Iraqi families and landed in Prague. Two weeks later a smuggler took them through forests and mountains to Munich. Germany granted her political asylum.

But one day a few years later she began receiving strange phone calls in Arabic. When a photo of Dalyia taken in Baghdad landed in her mailbox, she felt the circle of fear cinch close again.

This is what Newton - who advised on the tribunal that judged Saddam - called the "osmosis of fear" that plagued Iraqis for decades, reaching even those who fled to other countries.

Muhamed never considered a rational response, like going to the police. Instead, she bought three plane tickets to Mexico, having heard from other Iraqis on the run that she could enter the U.S. from there and gain refuge.

She had family members in Cleveland. But she felt she couldn't wait for them to petition for her to leave Europe. The danger was too great.

Six years later, after a denied political asylum application, an appeal to a lower court and another appeal to the 9th Circuit, the U.S. government has determined that Muhamed made a mistake the day she got on that plane.

Her attorney, Jeremiah Wolf Stuchiner, said there's a principle called sharing the burden, meaning different nations agree to accept refugees from conflicts and disasters worldwide. Federal authorities here were not willing to give Muhamed asylum if another country already granted her the same protection, he said.

"She was afraid and she just ran," he said. Now "she's running into the bureaucracy of refugee law," the attorney added.

Ironically, if Muhamed had lied about how she came to be in this country - claiming, for instance, that she came here directly from Iraq to escape life-threatening problems - she today might have a better chance of remaining in the U.S.

"I didn't want my life here to start with a lie," she said.

And while thousands of others who illegally cross the border from Mexico never seek legal status, Muhamed declared her intention to seek political asylum on reaching the border.

Several years later, Stuchiner ended up representing Muhamed in her appeal before the 9th Circuit. That court issued its denial April 20. Now, he said, the federal government probably will reinstate the original order deporting her to Iraq , which was leveled against Muhamed in a Las Vegas immigration court on April 27, 2004, more than a year after the war in Iraq began.

Her status in Germany is unclear. Lars Leymann, consul at the Los Angeles German Consulate, said being away from Germany for so long normally would result in a loss of residency, but there may be exceptions made when the person's country of origin is at war.

"It might be a very complicated case," he added.

Muhamed's daughter, Dalyia, spoke in measured, soft tones of her family's odyssey.

She said she has built a life where "the outside world didn't matter much, (since) we had our own little world in our home."

"I've always had this fear inside of where I'm going to be tomorrow," the 22-year-old added.

But in Las Vegas, she said she has started to feel some stability during the past six years.

She is a casino hostess and likes working in tourism because "you deal with different people and it's always different, every day something new."

Her mother, though, said it's hard to deal cards while worrying about her future. Recently she had to cut a shift short because she couldn't focus.

"It's difficult - you have to smile always and talk with people ... and I'm so stressed, " Muhamed said.

Dalyia, a junior at UNLV's School of Hotel Management, studies by day. She hopes to get a job at a big casino but realizes that day may never come.

"I try to plan but because of my background I don't plan way ahead," she said. "When I look at my future there's some light at the beginning and then it gets dark."