Focus of US fear: A legal refugee is recast as enemy
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After a day of talking about debts and doubts, his face brightens when Samira comes into the room.
It's been that way since the first moment he saw her in 1991. Then, sitting on a dusty hillock of his refugee camp in Syria, looking across the border to the hills of Iraq, his thoughts had been filled with cares for his mother. When Hussein's army invaded his hometown, he'd lost her as everyone fled, fearing the gas attacks that had killed thousands of Kurds earlier that year. Yet when he saw Samira step off a bus and walk through the camp's sea of tents, his life changed.
"I know everybody in the camp, but I don't know this girl. I said, 'I want to keep my eyes on her and see where she's going,' " he says, grinning broadly. In the camp, he'd watch her from his perch, then run to meet her at the well. But in his search for security and citizenship to Lebanon, Cyprus, the US he lost her. It wasn't until last fall, after a mutual friend in Detroit reconnected them, that Sadeq visited her in Winnipeg. On the last day of his visit, they married though he would have to return to America and the promise of his new job.
Today they remain clearly very much in love. When Samira is asked a question in English, she and Sadeq look at each other for a silent moment then giggle nervously, much as they might have 10 years ago. "I fell in love with him because he had no faults," she says in Kurdish, and Sadeq translates, chiding her gently for not trying her English more.
Samira is the happiest part of his life now, Sadeq says, and the mooring that got him through Krome. In those days, she says, "I cried a lot." She thought she'd never see him again, she says, when she got his first Sunday phone call from detention a call that would be a weekly ritual over the months. Sadeq is fiercely protective of her and the new life they're settling into. Fearful of involving her in the tumult of his life, he refused to let her be photographed for this article.
He'd like to become a truck driver again, but declines to comment on the record as to how he is currently supporting himself, other than to say that Samira works in a furniture factory and they get help from her family.
Yet those who know Sadeq have no doubts he'll succeed.
Nasser Shajira remembers the night Sadeq spent at his Dearborn apartment after he returned from Miami. Other guests usually left their corner strewn with blankets and Coke cans, but Sadeq had neatly folded all the sheets on the couch by the time Mr. Shajira awoke. It was typical Sadeq. "He is a hard worker ... a good example of someone who wants to succeed," says Shajira, a valet who used to work with Sadeq at a Detroit casino.
Mary Maniaci, a former landlady, recalls the good life Sadeq built in Dearborn contrasted with the visit he paid her after his detention. "It was like he had been to hell and back," says Ms. Maniaci. "He started to get a tear in his eye, and I told him, 'You made it. You got out, and that's more important than anything. Good things happen to good people.' "
When Sadeq hears by phone that Ms. Maniaci sent her love, Sadeq's voice trails off and wavers: "She is a very special person."
Sadeq sometimes glimpses the better future these friends see ahead of him: in the videotaped parade of elaborately festooned, honking cars during his marriage celebration and in the faces of his mother- and sister-in-law, who live in an apartment downstairs and come by often. This is his family now and his home.
He could still legally live in the US.
But he has no intention of ever going back. "[The United States] changed my life. [It] took me to zero. Now, I have to work my way back."
