A Rust Belt City Wrestles With Fear, Immigration, and its Future

One year ago, on January 29, 2018, Fidaa Musleh got an unexpected call from her husband, Amer Othman Adi. He was calling from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where he was boarding a flight to Jordan. After a three-decade battle to fend off deportation and a couple of weeks in detention at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center (NEOCC) near his adopted hometown of Youngstown, Amer was being deported. He was calling his wife to say goodbye.

Adi’s long fight to stay in America exemplifies the tenacity of many immigrants. He’d entered the U.S. on a visa in 1979 at age 19. A decade later, after his marriage to an American woman ended and he had remarried, the Immigration and Naturalization Service charged Adi with fraud and revoked his green card. He fought deportation through legal means, but in 2007, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) ordered him deported.