40 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
“Our country had to have its pound of
flesh.” Asgari ruminated ceaselessly on
the injustice of it all. He hadn’t sneaked
into the United States; he had obtained
a visa and paid for it. Why was he being
punished?
If there was ever a force equal to
Asgari’s will, it was the bureaucratic in-
ertia of ice. The immigration attorneys
he consulted were largely stymied by the
agency’s impenetrable structure. One
said, “I’m just throwing shit at a wall,
and every once in a while the wall throws
something back.” Another fruitlessly
chased Asgari’s paperwork from one
office to another: ice’s Enforcement and
Removal Operations, the F.B.I., Cus-
toms and Border Protection, the ice re-
gional headquarters in Detroit, the local
headquarters in Cleveland. At one point,
Asgari urged me to call ice officials in
Detroit and Cleveland who had signed
documents addressed to him. None of
them ever answered their phones.
ice occasionally sent representatives
to meet with detainees and discuss their
cases. They were just following proce-
dures, they told Asgari, and had no au-
thority to evaluate the logic or the jus-
tice of the measures they enforced. Asgari
answered the representatives by telling
them an Iranian joke. A man sees two
groups of workers, one digging a trench
along the road and the other following
behind to fill it up and cover it. The by-
stander, confounded, asks the workers
what they are doing. They say that the
government hired three contractors: one
to dig, one to install a pipeline, and the
third to cover it. The second contractor
never showed up, a worker says, adding,
“So we are doing our job.” Such, Asgari
concluded, was ice.
In January, he received a notice in-
forming him that prisoners with a de-
portation order could request a custody
review after ninety days, in the hope of
winning release under supervision. His
ninety days were up on February 13th.
He was invited to submit documenta-
tion showing that he was neither a flight
risk nor a danger to society. Asgari did
so eagerly, pointing out that during the
two years he’d awaited trial he’d obeyed
every court order and kept every cur-
few, and that in court he’d been exon-
erated. On February 19th, he received a
letter announcing that his request had
been denied. The letter was dated Feb-
ruary 3rd, ten days before the deadline—
and before he had even submitted his
supporting documents. Nobody had
looked at his file, he realized. The rea-
son that he was given for the refusal was
even more baffling: ice said that it was
waiting for Iran to issue him a travel
document, even though the passport
he’d surrendered to ice, in 2017, was
valid through 2022.
The deciding officer assigned to his
case was Scott Wichrowski. Asgari met
with him twice at Seneca. How, Asgari
asked, was waiting for a travel document
a reason to incarcerate a person? What
threat did he pose? Wichrowski, Asgari
told me, just looked at his shoes. “If I
were him, I would resign—I wouldn’t
just watch people suffering for nothing,”
Asgari grumbled. (Wichrowski declined
interview requests.)
At the legal library in Seneca County
Jail, Asgari happened on a quote from
Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Jus-
tice in the nineteen-forties and fifties:
“Procedural fairness and regularity are
of the indispensable essence of liberty....
Indeed, if put to the choice, one might
well prefer to live under Soviet substan-
tive law applied in good faith by our
common-law procedures than under our
substantive law enforced by Soviet pro-
cedural practices.” Asgari concluded that
he was a victim of American law en-
forced by Soviet-style procedures.T
he coronavirus cut a brutal swath
through Iran in February before
wracking the United States. Flights to
Iran were suspended. At first, Asgari was
merely irritated; then he began to panic.
He was at high risk of a severe covid-19
infection. For six years, he’d suffered from
repeated bouts of pneumonia, and he
had a chronic liver condition and high
blood pressure. Late that month, he de-
veloped a lung infection, but he took an-
tibiotics and it cleared up, so he figured
that it wasn’t covid-19. Then, as the pan-
demic worsened, ice began transferring
him to one fetid prison after another.
His first transfer, on March 10th, took
some twelve hours. He and other detain-
ees, in shackles and chains, could hardly
move their hands to eat, and some pris-
oners soiled themselves for lack of toi-
let access. They flew from base to base
and finally landed in Alexandria, Loui-
siana, where ice had a deportation hub.When it was time to disembark, Asgari
had a pounding headache and could
hardly stand; when he reached the stairs
descending from the plane, he fainted.
Asgari was told that detainees could
be kept at the Alexandria Staging Facil-
ity for a maximum of one week. The
place was correspondingly stark, with-
out books or the camaraderie of a stable
cohort. Asgari’s blood pressure spiked.
After seven days, he was scheduled for
deportation. He spent another sixteen
hours in shackles—this time going north,
to New Hampshire, then south, to New
Jersey, and then west, to Texas. At every
stop, the plane sat for hours on the tar-
mac as more prisoners boarded. In the
end, Asgari’s flight to Iran was cancelled,
because of the pandemic. The ice plane
finally landed again at Alexandria at 10:45
p.m., with more than a hundred people
on board—many of them, including
Asgari, the same detainees who had left
the facility that morning.
Asgari noticed that the corrections
officers at Alexandria had taken to wear-
ing masks, and he suspected that they
knew something he didn’t. He had a
mask in a suitcase that Mohammad had
packed for his deportation, but he was
forbidden to retrieve it. The transport
hub was, as he put it, a viral bomb ready
to detonate. Its population churned as
other countries stopped accepting de-
portees. As most Americans began shel-
tering in place and tried to stay six feet
apart on the street, the detainees in the
Alexandria Staging Facility all but pick-
led in their shared breath.
On March 23rd, Asgari was put on
another plane that flew hither and thither,
collecting and disgorging inmates at every
stop, and again he ended up back at the
transport hub. Because he had left Al-
exandria for a day, ice had technically
avoided housing him at the facility for
more than a week. Mohammad, in New
York, reached out to activists and law-
yers with mounting panic that his father
would not live to return to Iran. Fatemeh
could not visit him: she had applied for
a visa to go to America, but her request
had been denied.
If only Asgari had been convicted of
theft of trade secrets, he would be in the
criminal-justice system in Ohio, where
Stephen Newman was working tirelessly
to win his clients compassionate release
from virus-ridden prisons. “We can’t get