After judge orders Iraqi man’s release, agents whisked him to custody in Bakersfield

Omar Ameen was ready to go home to his family for the first time since his August 2018 arrest.

A federal magistrate judge ordered his immediate release Wednesday from the Sacramento County Jail, declaring that the government had failed to make its case that Ameen was an ISIS commander who should be extradited back to Iraq to face charges of murdering a police officer.

His lawyers had visited him to deliver the news, did a round of celebratory media interviews outside the jail and waited for his release.

Then, federal immigration agents took custody of the 47-year-old Iraqi national and drove him to a detention facility near Bakersfield, where he was being held Thursday on essentially the same charges that U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan had dismissed.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” Assistant Federal Defender Rachelle Barbour said Thursday afternoon. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no immediate explanation Thursday for why Ameen was still in custody, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento declined to comment.

But Barbour said it stemmed from an Aug. 15, 2018, filing by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after his arrest by FBI agents in Sacramento.

The filing alleges Ameen “procured your admission as a refugee by fraud” by lying about whether he had ties to ISIS or other terror groups, the same claims contained in the extradition request that Brennan dismissed Wednesday.

“Apparently, no one’s taken a look at that for the last two and a half years,” Barbour said. “I sent ICE a copy of Judge Brennan’s ruling and a request that they release Omar.”

Barbour and Chief Assistant Federal Defender Ben Galloway, who fought since 2018 to win Ameen’s release, had expected him to walk of the downtown jail Wednesday afternoon.

But they soon learned the U.S. Marshals Service had turned him over to ICE agents, and that Ameen had been driven all night to the lockup near Bakersfield.

“We’re used to disappointment, and we knew this ICE proceeding has kind of been hanging there,” Barbour said. “It’s been stayed and the date has just gotten moved. We had no reason to think he had a hold.”

Barbour added that Ameen is observing Ramadan, and fasting between dawn and sunset.

“They drove him all night long and it’s Ramadan and he’d only had water yesterday,” she said. “They picked him up before sundown, so he arrived at Bakersfield with no food in his stomach.

“I think he had to eat quickly before sunup.”

Now, his attorneys are working to get Ameen an immigration attorney and trying to get ICE to release Ameen in the meantime on bond.

“ICE could let him out today if they read what I sent them,” she said. “He’s in their hands. An ICE agent could grant him bond and we could pay it.”

Barbour, who traveled to Turkey in her effort to dig up evidence that Ameen was in Mersin, Turkey, with his family when the police officer was killed, said the latest detention of her client just adds to teh expense of the entire case.

“Don’t forget how expensive this is,” she said. “All of this could have been avoided.

“It’s like Groundhog Day. Are we really doing this again?”