Detentions and disappearances: how ICE has driven fear into Michigan’s Arab communities

Lorenda Lewis is so tired she can barely keep her head straight. Surrounded by her six young children at a cafe in Dearborn, Michigan, she recounts the nightmare of the past four months that saw her husband, Abdelouahid Aouchiche, an Algerian national, taken away.

It was still dark when, at about 5.15am last October, her 61-year-old husband and 12-year-old son, Abdullah, arrived at the Furqan mosque for morning prayers. Abdullah recalls his father being approached by two men outside the mosque, grabbing him and asking for his papers. After a brief conversation, he says he was allowed to call his mother and told to go inside the mosque by the agents. When she arrived minutes later, her husband and the agents were gone.

Things have worsened in the months since.

Having been held at the notorious North Lake processing center in Baldwin, Michigan, for months, this week Lorenda received word that her husband was to be deported to Algeria this weekend.

“I don’t even know if they told him that he’s going to be deported,” she says. “Things are going to be really difficult. It’s going to place a bigger financial issue on me.”

Aouchiche’s lawyers say his expected deportation would be illegal, in part because he has two cases pending before the Department of Justice’s board of immigration appeals.

“ICE has deported him in violation of immigration laws. It’s a bad faith effort to frustrate his legal claims,” says Jad Salamey, his attorney.

“On October 6, 2025, ICE arrested Abdelouahid Aouchiche, a criminal illegal alien from Algeria convicted of vehicular manslaughter and precisely arrested for domestic violence. This criminal was issued a final order of removal by a judge in 2008,” a statement attributed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Tricia McLaughlin and shared with the Guardian said.

“He has received full due process. He entered the US in 1994 on a B2 tourist visa that allowed him to remain in the US for six months. He overstayed his visa and never departed. He received full due process and has not appealed his final order.”

Salamey says Aouchiche pleaded guilty to a moving violation causing death two years ago that was accidental in nature and resulted in a misdemeanor with a sentence of probation, that he was not convicted of vehicular manslaughter, and that he was not formally charged with domestic violence.

From truck drivers to construction workers, Arab Americans in Dearborn are being swept up by ICE at places of worship and work, with devastating consequences.

“The level of anxiety among people is at its highest; we’ve never seen something like this,” says Imad Hamad, executive director of the Dearborn-based American Human Rights Council.

Dearborn has been on edge for months. In November 2025, rightwing provocateurs held anti-Islam rallies in the city and attempted to burn a copy of the Qur’an. At a city council meeting on 18 November 2025, extremists hurled insults and Islamophobic slurs at local leaders. On 31 January, a masked person allegedly impersonating an ICE agent was reported in a Dearborn supermarket asking shoppers about their visa status.

“We thought that after the national tragedy of September 11 we would never face something more difficult than that particular experience,” Hamad says, referencing the waves of anti-Arab and Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Nowadays, it’s much tougher; there’s no comparison even – people are very concerned, very worried as they try to pursue their normal life.”

In 2019, an Iraqi national who had lived in Michigan since he was an infant was deported to Iraq, a place he had never previously visited (his nationality was assigned through his father’s nationality). He died in Baghdad following health complications and his remains were later returned to Detroit for burial.

Tens of thousands of Arab Americans in Dearborn and beyond flocked to Trump in the 2024 presidential election due to his opponent, Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. For the first time since 2000, a Republican presidential candidate won a plurality of votes in the city in 2024, where more than half the 110,000 residents claim Arab heritage.

Arif Armanjisan watches an advertisement for Donald Trump at his campaign office the night before the general election 4 November 2024, in Hamtramck, Michigan. Photograph: David Goldman/AP

Since retaking office, Trump has mandated travel bans and a shutdown on immigrant visa processing for citizens of 12 Arab-majority countries and territories, angering the voters who helped him to the White House.

“In the past, [Arab Americans who supported Trump] would say things like: ‘You got to control the border,’” says Abdul-Galil Ahmed of the Yemen American Cultural Center, who says he didn’t vote for Trump or Harris in the 2024 presidential election. “Now, the mood has changed, they are saying this is too much. We have become a target.”

Ahmed says there are thousands of Yemeni nationals in the Detroit area on temporary protected status (TPS) who are living in fear with the Trump administration due plans to terminate TPS for Yemenis in April.

“Their fate is hanging in the air. Yemenis don’t have much lobbying power to fight this in court,” he said, adding that many other Yemeni and Arab American families in the community have been hit by the travel ban.

“The impact of the ban has been devastating to a lot of people. Yemen is not like Egypt or north Africa – Yemen [has been at war] for over 12 years.”

According to data from the Deportation Data Project, an organization tracking immigration enforcement, a person matching Aouchiche’s description was detained on 6 October by ICE’s fugitive operations team under a classification known as “other immigration violator”.

But the Department of Homeland Security’s own glossary says this categorization refers to: “Immigration Violators without any known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges entered into ICE system of record.”

The justice department did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment at press time.

As a US citizen, Lewis says she petitioned to get her husband lawful permanent residency, which was pending at the time of his detention. Each journey the family made to visit Aouchiche at the North Lake processing center, a seven-hour round-trip, was a disastrous experience.

“A couple of my kids had jogging pants. They couldn’t go see him because they had on sweatpants,” she said. “[It was] demeaning, humiliating. A man started yelling at me.”

Geo Group, the largest operator of prisons in the US which owns the Michigan facility, directed the Guardian to ICE, which did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether or not the facility has dress requirements.

While Geo calls its ICE facilities “residential shelters”, it has been subjected to lawsuits and roiled in controversy for allegedly forcing detainees at immigration detention centers to work for no pay. The Florida-headquartered Geo Group reported a $254m-profit for last year. Geo claims it should have “derivative sovereign immunity” due to its work for the federal government. In December, a Bulgarian man died at the North Lake processing center.

Now, that episode at the center is the least of the family’s problems: Lewis’s husband is set for deportation to a country he hasn’t visited in more than three decades.

“We would have to travel to visit him; that’s going to be very costly; it’s hard to know what the next decision is,” she said.

Self-employed as a doula, Lewis now finds herself as the sole breadwinner and caretaker of her children.

Sitting next to her in the cafe, Lewis’s exhausted six-year-old son is making another attempt at sleeping on a pillow. Her children are going to therapy to help deal with the stress.

“Last Monday, he got up, got dressed and wanted to go to the masjid,” she said. “He wanted to see his baba.”