By Cassy Benefield | FāVS News Associate Editor
His name is Nurul Amin Shah Alam. He came to America 15 months ago to start a new life in the hopes of freedom and safety. He is a Rohingya refugee from Burma, part of a people group the United Nations calls “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
Having been denied citizenship since 1982 in the land of their birth, the Rohingya are a Muslim minority living in a largely Buddhist country and known as “the world’s largest stateless population.”
A ‘courtesy ride’ and a death
Some time after Thursday, he died trying to find his way home. The Border Patrol in Buffalo, New York, gave him a “courtesy ride” to a coffee shop 5 miles from where he lived and did not notify his family that he was released from their custody.
Blind, 56, disabled and speaking little to no English, his death is now being investigated after the local medical examiner announced that it was “health related in nature.” He had been held in immigration detention for a year. The powers that be could not find a reasonable and lawful way to deport him out of the country.
He was finally released after he accepted a plea deal. He was charged with “offenses including assault, trespassing and possession of a weapon.”
His crime? Going for a walk, getting lost, winding up on a woman’s porch and not being able to speak or understand English. After she called the police, he was tasered, beaten and arrested from the woman’s porch. He could not understand their commands.
This is not a new American story
While about 85-95% of Americans are not affected by these current immigration policies, enough are affected for it to matter to all of us.
But I’m writing this because it matters to me. Lest I begin to think this is a “new thing under the sun,” I am reminded that African Americans from the foundation of our country have always lived under a similar system of unfairness and oppression, as if their bodies did not matter. Much like Shah Amin’s.
This has not changed in the present day. We just need to read the names of Black Americans killed at the hands of police. One of whom changed my life: George Floyd.
Our society is openly and flagrantly showing its stripes of ethnocentrism and white nationalism and supremacy, calling it “maintaining our Christian heritage” in the name of removing “illegal alien criminals.”
Christianity invoked, justice ignored
But as the news has shown, undocumented immigrants aren’t the only lives threatened.
My heart grieves even more because I am not hearing Republican Christians stand up against this rhetoric or these actions. Instead, they continue to promote this “saving of America” by whitewashing the government’s illegal behaviors and ignoring the deaths and injuries of the innocent.
Even some national and state Republican Christian lobby groups, like the Family Policy Institute of Washington, openly say Muslims, “illegal immigrants,” refugees and those who don’t speak English are threats to the American Way of Life — the one rooted in white European culture, religion and nationality.
What I say in response is that this is contrary to the Jesus of the Gospels I read about. Did he come to save a race or to establish a Jewish nation? Did he come to pit us against neighbors that live outside borders in such a mean spirit?
My heart is grieved, and I have to say Shah Alam’s name like I do Floyd’s out loud to stand up against what I see is the abhorrent treatment of people created in the image of God.
His name matters. His life was a gift we should have nurtured and nourished on our soil.
As I was pondering how to write this column, I kept thinking of the section in Isaiah 59 that talks about truth falling down in the street, to be trampled by humans.
In verses 14-15, it says, “So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.”
Lord Jesus, enter me into that number who shuns evil so that refugees and others who come here from circumstances we can’t begin to imagine, will know they are welcome and loved — not arrested, falsely accused and eventually murdered or left to die.
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Thank you, Cassy, for bringing to light this tragic story of a refugee persecuted in his homeland and persecuted here. And thank you for your Christian witnessing against such tragedies.
Beautifully written, Cassy. What a horrible, avoidable tragedy. That poor man and his family. I appreciate you tying it to the bigger picture of America’s history of racism. Maybe if enough of us learn and repent from those foundations, we’ll see a societal change.