Shattered American Dream

Most immigrants leave their country in quest for bright future and they usually prefer to work in US may be because of high currency value of Dollar and much hyped up “American Way of Life“. Lot of Pakistani immigrants work hard to benefit American System and economy but they had to pay some times with their life for American Dream.

New York Times has published a disturbing story of a detainee and his death, kept in official oblivion for three years in Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J and after overlooking federal authorities added the name Tanveer Ahmad, 43 to the list of fatalities in custody. It shows how 9/11 changed the stakes for those twisted in U.S immigration laws.

Tanveer Ahmad was longtime New York City cabdriver who had paid thousands of dollars in taxes and immigration application fees. Whether out of love, loneliness or the quest for a green card, he had twice married American women after entering the country on a visitor’s visa in 1993. His only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: While working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery — reason enough, after 9/11, for authorities to detain him pending exile proceedings.

In Aug, 2005 immigration agents burst into his apartment looking for some one else but they ordered Him to report to immigration headquarters where He went, and was delivered in chains to the immigration detention cell. He dies here after three weeks but there was no record about him that who he was and how he died. He had worked for dozens of years in US and what he got, a death in oblivion? The U.S authorities after 9/11 are responsible for many such incidents. An immigrant’s death in detention, acknowledged after three years is itself a crime against humanity. We should protest against it. Those who urge to work abroad should now know the price of it. No self esteem and pride for immigrants even legal or illegal.

Fellow inmates had complained that Mr. Ahmad’s chest pains and pleas for treatment went unheeded at the jail until too late. But for more than three years after his death from a heart attack there, federal authorities maintained that they could find no documents showing such a person had died or was ever detained — as shown by this e-mail message in February.