Federal immigration officials moving to deport Omar Ameen back to Iraq

Iraqi refugee Omar Ameen is facing deportation proceedings despite a Sacramento judge’s ruling last month that there was not enough evidence to extradite him back to his home country to face trial in the slaying of a police officer there, officials confirmed Wednesday.

Ameen, 47, had been in the Sacramento County Main Jail since his 2018 arrest in the extradition case, and his lawyers expected him to be released April 21 after the judge’s finding.

Instead, Ameen was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and is now facing deportation proceedings on the grounds that he allegedly lied on his applications to come to the United States as a refugee, ICE said in a statement Wednesday.

The statement notes that, at the same time Ameen was arrested by FBI agents in the extradition case, ICE charged him “based on misrepresentations on applications for admission.”

“Ameen is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,” the statement said.

Lawyer says there is no evidence to deport Ameen

The revelation outraged his attorneys, who say the federal government has failed to produce any evidence that Ameen should be deported.

“Mr. Ameen is legally present in the United States as a lawfully admitted refugee and has been unjustly incarcerated for nearly three years,” Siobhan Waldron, managing attorney for Immigrant Legal Defense in Oakland, wrote in an email to The Bee. “ICE’s allegations reference evidence and arguments that were presented by the Department of Justice to a federal district court judge who emphatically dismissed the federal government’s extradition case.

“ICE has the heavy burden in Immigration Court to prove any alleged deportability of Mr. Ameen by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence. The federal government failed to meet a much more generous probable cause standard in the extradition proceedings. ICE has filed no evidence in Immigration Court to support its case that Mr. Ameen can be deported to Iraq.

“ICE is now trying to use the immigration court system, which is part of the Department of Justice, the same federal agency that aggressively sought his extradition - to get a second bite at the apple. The federal government lost in the extradition proceedings, so now it is trying to deport him.”

Ameen’s federal defenders have argued that he faced the very real possibility of execution if he was extradited, and Waldron argued that is still the case.

“Mr. Ameen is in more danger now than ever if he were sent back to Iraq,” Waldron wrote. “If ICE continues to prosecute him, Mr. Ameen will continue to fight to save his life and pursue the various forms of relief available to him in Immigration Court. Mr. Ameen is not a danger to society and should be immediately released by ICE.”

Court records accuse Ameen of lying on visa forms

ICE provided no other details about its deportation case, but federal court records show that when Ameen was arrested at his Arden Arcade apartment Aug. 15, 2018, ICE simultaneously filed a “notice to appear” charging him with visa fraud “by willfully misrepresenting a material fact.”

The ICE case was placed on hold while Ameen fought extradition, but the court records, filed the same day as his arrest, claim Ameen made various misrepresentations on his visa application, including failing to mention any ties to ISIS or other terror groups.

Ameen’s lawyers have said he has no such ties, and Ameen’s case has created an outcry among immigration advocates and others, including Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and council members who have asked the U.S. Homeland Security secretary to allow Ameen to return to his wife and children in Sacramento.

His lawyers and supporters also have set up a website to advocate for Ameen, whose case has garnered international attention.

In his extradition ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan did not directly address government claims that Ameen had ties to terror.

Instead, he found that the government’s position that Ameen traveled from his home in Mersin, Turkey, where he was waiting for permission to enter the United States, to war-torn Iraq in 2014 to kill the officer “is simply not plausible.”

Prosecutors also accuse Ameen of lying on his refugee resettlement forms about how his father died, saying in court records that Ameen claimed his father was “shot dead” for assisting the American military.

“In actuality, the death certificate for Abdulsattar Ameen (which Ameen did not submit with any of his applications) indicates he died from natural causes—a cerebral clot—on December 25, 2010,” court records say.

“Ameen’s claim that his father was killed due to his possible assistance to military forces is a fiction, and his refugee application was approved in part on the basis of this false claim,” the court records say, adding that Ameen also lied about his father’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq and other relatives’ ties to terror.

“When asked in his written Sworn Statement in support of his refugee application ‘Have you ever engaged in . . . any other form of terrorist activity? Ameen answered ‘no,’” the court records say. “In actuality, Ameen is alleged to have engaged in various forms of terrorist activity, from 2004 through his departure from the region for the United States in 2014.”

The records say that because Ameen allegedly lied about ties to terror groups he was granted permission to move to the United States under false pretenses.

“Ameen’s negative answers cut off a line of questioning relevant to his admissibility to the United States,” prosecutors wrote. “Based on the written and verbal answers given by Ameen, his refugee application was approved by USCIS on June 5, 2014.”

Ameen attorney says feds are wasting taxpayer dollars

But Rachelle Barbour, Ameen’s federal defender in the extradition case, said Wednesday the accusations that Ameen had any ties to terror were phony.

“Mr. Ameen is a lawful refugee in the United States who was falsely alleged to be an ISIS commander and murderer by the very country from which he fled,” Barbour wrote in an emailed statement to The Bee. “We proved by the most stringent burden of proof possible in Federal Court that Mr. Ameen was fully innocent of the outrageous claims against him.

“The false claims of participation in ISIS come from the very same informants who claimed Omar was a murderer and commander during ISIS’s takeover of Anbar Province. Omar was in Turkey, without leaving, from April 1, 2012 to November 4, 2014, during the very time that ISIS was assembling its forces and advancing into Iraq.

“His complete lack of involvement with ISIS is proven by the evidence extensively documenting that Omar never left Turkey during this time. And of course, the U.S. Government was unable to provide a single shred of independent evidence to corroborate these lying witnesses – and that is because Omar had nothing to do with ISIS.”

Barbour called the judge’s ruling against allowing extradition “a resounding rejection of these allegations, finding that Mr. Ameen was actually in Turkey at the time that these lying witnesses claimed he was in Iraq with ISIS.”

“Now apparently the government wants another try, after losing in federal court,” she added. “Tax dollars are being wasted, and Mr. Ameen’s life is being destroyed, in service of a lie that has been completely adjudicated and roundly rejected.

“At the very least, Mr. Ameen, a stable and respected member of the Sacramento community, deserves to be home with his family while he fights these allegations yet again.”

This story was originally published May 5, 2021 at 12:41 PM.