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Ansar Mahmood's American Dream
A Pakistani Immigrant Waits for Deliverance in Jail Rather Than Be Deported Back Home

By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 28, 2003; Page D01

BUFFALO -- The photograph shows the niece he has never met bundled into a red jumper and chasing a ball. But all Ansar Mahmood sees is the ground shifting around her: cracks in the cement wall, damp floor, rusting water heater, a bicycle missing a spoke, all the repairs left undone while he's stuck in this jail. Nineteen months in the Buffalo Federal Detention Center, long enough to give his baby face edges and to earn him this dubious national record: Mahmood may be the last person detained on immigration charges in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks who is still in jail, fighting deportation.

"Every day, every day, same routine," he says. Breakfast at 7 and then -- this is what kills him -- he sleeps until almost noon, because what else is there? "I cannot anymore sit here to do nothing."

Even in jail he works steadily, earning a dollar a day washing dishes so he can call his parents in Pakistan. "Come home," they say. But then something -- his father's cough, perhaps -- will remind him of what's forever lost if he does return: medicine, school fees for his sisters, heat, a shot at the middle class.

"What can I do there?" he says. "No job, no money, just sit to look at my family to suffer? I cannot imagine I put myself in such a position."

It's a wretched choice: jail in the United States or a bored, guilt-ridden freedom in Pakistan.

Mahmood was one of hundreds of immigrants arrested after Sept. 11 and threatened with deportation on immigration violations. But unlike many in that anonymous mass, he had a green card and a committee of supporters in his adopted town of Hudson, N.Y., started by customers on his pizza delivery route.

After a Washington Post article about him a year and a half ago, Mahmood got a legal fund, new lawyers, international press. By now one might think he'd be the perfect candidate for one of those bittersweet Sept. 11 anniversary stories -- a fatherless baby's first word, a widow who finds new love. In his case, the headline would have read something like "Breaking Through Barriers: Small Town Saves Muslim Immigrant From Deportation." But Mahmood's story is stuck in the second-to-last chapter.

He was cleared of terrorism charges days after his arrest that November. But as in many immigrants' cases, investigators uncovered something that in a different time might have stayed hidden or ignored: Mahmood had helped an undocumented friend from Pakistan rent an apartment, a common favor in the immigrant network. For that, he was convicted of harboring an illegal immigrant -- a charge that, before Sept. 11, had been used almost exclusively against smugglers at border points.

"He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," reads a petition circulating in Hudson. "He worked 12-hour days, sent $500 a month to his elderly parents and sisters." But the facts, once uncovered, don't disappear. So far his legal appeals have all failed. Short of a special congressional bill voiding his deportation order, he's stuck in detention until he agrees to join the next planeload of deportees back to Pakistan.

Which lately Mahmood is thinking of doing. So earlier this month three of his friends from Hudson piled into their Toyota Camry with a bag of cherries and drove the five hours to Buffalo to get him to change his mind.

Visiting hour was really a half-hour, so each would get only 10 minutes to talk on a phone through a glass pane.

"Who's first?" the guards asks. Susan Davies, who'd talked to Mahmood the most on the phone, stands up. She was "like the mother" of the crowd, Mahmood will later say. She remembered that the next day was his 26th birthday, and said she wanted to give him two things: a hug and a peach. The guards wouldn't allow either.

Mahmood's previous visitors had all been journalists or lawyers and he prepared for this day as eagerly as a child at show and tell. Sitting on the other side of a glass divider, he lays out a pile of photographs one by one, pointing out every relative. "This is the brother above me," he says. "This is his child," meaning the adorable niece. But after three or four, he finds himself distracted by the background.

There, in the bottom left, is the water heater. The last time he traveled to Pakistan he had enough money to buy his family many of the accessories of the middle class: a 26-inch TV, a refrigerator, "the big biggest one, bigger than my uncle's!" In retrospect this seems a mistake. "Now they have bills coming more," he says, meaning the electricity bills. Maybe he should have taken care of the basics, the roof, the floor. From where he is now it looks like showing off, and worse: "I helped them come near to middle class but not all the way," a more frustrating fate.

Next is Nancy Rothman. She has never talked to Mahmood before, yet she is the one who moves him most. With her moist eyes and piles of long hair falling out of clips she radiates the empathy of one of his doting older sisters.

"This is the first time we speak," he says as soon as she picks up the phone on her side of the glass divider. "I miss my family. I cannot be with them. You are my family."

Again he goes through the pictures, but then puts them away and aims for more common ground. "Hudson is so beautiful," he says, catching her by surprise. He then runs dreamily through his favorite streets on his pizza delivery route, down to the house numbers ("19 Gahbauer Road. So pretty"). He tells her his favorite place in the world is Philmont, so "beautiful in the snowkistan 23 years "I am in Pa but Pakistan is not my home," he says. "My home is Hudson."

The two women use up most of the half-hour, so Azim Goldrick gets only a few minutes. Because Azim is a man, Mahmood, who tends to the overemotional, is determined not to cry. Instead he makes global comparisons.

In Pakistan, he says, people will cheat you. But in America "everyone is equal." In America there is an immigration lottery, which someone like him can win. There are jobs by the millions. In America, everyone is so nice -- he is thinking particularly of his co-worker at Domino's who would help him fill out his tax returns, and whose family now prays for him every day. Azim tells him not to lose hope, says he, too, will pray for him.

That evening Mahmood can't eat his dinner. He can't wash his face or sleep. He's both giddy and somber. "God make their mind soft, so they help me," he says, because he can't believe three virtual strangers would otherwise help somebody like him.

But days in detention are long. Two weeks later his mood is dark again. More and more at night he thinks of outside, of freedom, he says. The vision that comes to him is "driving, in the snowstorm delivering pizzas. Just me, the policeman and the man cleaning the streets. It is beautiful."

But this is not his choice. Outside right now means Pakistan, and "I cannot go back to Pakistan." It's not that his parents will be disappointed to see him. But his face will mean the end of their hopes. "If I go back it means everything finished for them." Now that he's really thinking of leaving, his parents don't tell him to come home anymore. His sister once whispered not to come, there is nothing there for him.

Mahmood is religious enough to think his fate will depend on "what's written for my life." His hopes are cautious. Right now they are pinned on something he heard on the radio, a quote from Abraham Lincoln implying "the people's opinions can influence anything," meaning the people of Hudson. He's also heard from a friend that the next plane back to Pakistan leaves at the end of the month.