After six months in an ICE facility in Pennsylvania and a 31-hour train ride from Pittsburgh, Islam Aly on Monday stepped onto the platform of the Amtrak station in Orlando with a beaming smile.
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“It’s freaking hot, how long have you guys been here?” he said with a laugh as his friends embraced him.
He returned looking different from when he had left. Aly was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease inside the facility, suffered some vision loss and dropped over 45 pounds.
He turned to one of his friends, Lisa Barfield, who along with her husband Mark wore a T-shirt bearing Aly’s face and the words “Free Izzy” across the chest.
“Lisa Barfield,” Aly said, looking to her. “Thank you. Thank you very much —”
“I didn’t do anything,” Barfield said.
“No, listen, you got to me in there when you said you cried for me. Do you have any idea what a detainee feels when they hear that?” he replied.
“People who they used to live among and they used to actually talk with and breathe with and share the same space with — I’m sorry I put you through this,” Aly said. “I am very, very regretful. I could have been more careful.”
“It’s not your fault,” she insisted.
Aly had been arrested Dec. 23 after flying into Philadelphia as he was coming home from Egypt, where he was visiting following the death of his father.
A green card applicant at the time, he was granted parole by the government allowing him to leave the U.S. temporarily to settle his father’s affairs — only to be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement upon his return and sent to the notorious Moshannon Valley Processing Center, where his health suffered after being diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. He wasn’t notified about his diagnosis for two months, he said.
On Friday, Aly was released on his own recognizance by ICE, but it’s not clear why.
“I feel lucky but also a little bit lost,” he said. “This is the first stage in my life where I don’t know what’s going to happen from here, and that is the least I can say for tens of thousands of other people around the country in worse situations.”
After Aly’s attorney filed a habeas corpus petition in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the U.S. Attorney’s Office there argued that permission to leave the country doesn’t legally protect him from being detained, according to federal court filings obtained by the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, formerly known as Habeas Dockets, and shared with the Orlando Sentinel.
Aly, who arrived Monday dressed in the same black suit he wore to his father’s funeral, was advised by his lawyers not to discuss his case with reporters.
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But looking back, he had “too much faith in the system,” he said.
Although he has lived in the U.S. for 13 years, first on a student visa and eventually on an E-2 investor visa after starting a media production company, records show authorities determined Aly was not “clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted” after arriving in Philadelphia, citing in part an alleged “sham marriage” with an American citizen.
Meanwhile, the life Aly built in Orlando fell apart. He lost his car, his Hunters Creek apartment, his valuables and his beloved cat, Mia. With no money to his name, a GoFundMe page created to cover his legal and medical expenses collected over $12,000, and activists and the Muslim community in Pittsburgh raised the money to buy him a train ticket home.
He’s now focused on getting his life back together with the help of his friends, who secured a place for him to stay ahead of future check-ins with immigration authorities — while seeking medical care for his kidney disease.
“The R&R that I’m looking for is not ‘rest and relaxation,’ it’s recovery and restitution,” Aly said. “I lost all my property. I lost everything. I lost my damn cat. I need to find my cat.”
The federal petition is expected to be dismissed now that he’s been released, and an immigration judge’s decision to reject his green card application is under appeal.
Aly’s case and others at Moshannon were highlighted by local news outlets and activists in Clearfield County, Pa., who demanded the detention center — run by the Florida-based private prison company GEO Group — be shut down.
Aly remembers other detainees cheering for him on the day he was released. Some offered advice on how to protect himself legally on the outside.
On the train ride home, he looked over news coverage of his detention and reflected on the social media comment sections attacking him. Some of the derogatory posts, he observed, coincided with increased donations to the GoFundMe supporting him.
While he is happy to be free, his thoughts remain with the other detainees at Moshannon. There’s a lot of work to be done to help them, Aly said.
“The only way I’m probably going to be able to heal properly from this — at the very least psychologically, mentally — is to just pour myself into it, just let it devour me and contact as many people as possible to help out others that are still stuck back there,” he said. “We still mourn that they didn’t come with me.”
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