Al Jazeera

Mogadishu, Somalia – Mukhtar Abdiwhab Ahmed sits in a plastic chair outside his house in Mogadishu. Nearby, children play, soldiers congregate, and rickshaws speed by under the scorching sun.

“If I knew I would end up here [in Somalia] I would have never gotten these tattoos,” the 39-year-old tells Al Jazeera, saying he has taken to mostly wearing long sleeves to avoid the negative comments and “dirty looks” he gets from people in the city.

Mukhtar spent most of his life in the United States but has struggled to readapt to conservative Somali society since being deported in 2018 under the first Donald Trump presidency.

Now, newly inaugurated for a second time in office, the Trump administration has once again announced removal orders for migrants he says are in the US “illegally”. This includes more than 4,000 Somalis who, like Mukhtar, face deportation to the country of their birth.

But lawyers, activists and Somalis who were deported from the US in previous years say the plan may put lives at risk as insecurity and instability still plague Somalia, readapting to a country many left as children is difficult, and work opportunities are scarce.

Meanwhile, Washington itself warns its own citizens about “crime, terrorism, civil unrest … kidnapping, [and] piracy” in the East African country, where attacks by the armed group al-Shabab are a common occurrence.

‘The wrong path’

Mukhtar and his family were among the first to flee Somalia after the collapse of the government in 1991. They left for neighbouring Kenya before Mukhtar and his older brother made it to the US as refugees.

The two settled in the south end of Seattle, Washington in 1995 – an area with high rates of poverty and youth violence, where Mukhtar says he fell into “crime, drugs and temptation”.

“At 16, I started getting into trouble,” he says. He skipped school, dabbled in crime, and was arrested and charged with a felony after stealing and crashing a relative’s car.

Though he tried to get his life on track, in 2005, he was charged with armed robbery. It was the then 19-year-old’s first time going through the system as an adult; he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison.

The day his sentence ended, agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) visited him in prison, and instead of releasing him, transferred Mukhtar to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington – one of the largest immigration detention centres in the US.

“It felt like serving two sentences for committing one crime, and when I reached the immigration jail, I felt like an animal being taken to the slaughterhouse,” he says.

A few months in, ICE agents brought him a document to sign, saying he would be deported to Somalia. As part of its Criminal Alien Program, ICE works to identify and remove jailed migrants they believe “threaten the safety” of the US.

Mukhtar says he knew he wouldn’t be deported as Somalia was at war. It was 2007 and during that time, US-backed Ethiopian troops were in the country battling splinter groups that rose from the ashes following the ouster of the Islamic Courts Union, and the subsequent rise of its youth military wing, al-Shabab.

Tired of being in prison, Mukhtar decided to sign the document. But after he was released by ICE, he says he “kept going down the wrong path”. When he was arrested for burglary in 2015, he expected to be released after completing his one-year sentence, but ICE showed up again and sent him back to Northwest Detention Center for 11 months.

“It was like history repeating itself once again,” he says.

He again thought ICE would not deport him to Somalia “because of the war and instability back home”. But in December 2017, he was among 92 Somalis put on a deportation flight manned by ICE agents that prompted an international outcry after the plane did not make it to its destination for logistical reasons and it emerged that the deportees were abused en route.

“We were abused on the deportation flight,” he says. “I recall there were about 20 guards, they roughed up a lot of us, including one guy who was tased. They really beat us and, mind you, the whole time we were in handcuffs and shackled by our waist and feet for like 40 hours.”

Read more: ‘Somalia is dangerous’: Former US deportees struggle with fear, uncertainty

Source: Al Jazeera