newsnextbd.com :
A Bangladeshi student has been detained at John F Kennedy airport in US by the Department of Homeland Security as he landed on student visa at the airport on Tuesday,human rights lawyers said.
A human rights lawyer in the USA said a message that the student was taken into custody after he arrived at JFK travelling 30 hours from Bangladesh.
“He entered legally on an F1 student visa and after being interrogated by CBP (Custom and Border Protection in US) in English (which he does not speak well at all) after a 30 hour flight from Bangladesh, in three different rooms for 12 hours,” lawyer Iman Boukadoum said.
The lawyer did not disclose the name of the student, but she sought cooperation from fellow lawyers to defend the Bangladeshi man.
In a social media post, Boukadoum, narrated the haplessness of the student, who repeatedly wished to kill himself after being detained.
“This is a pro bono case Do any immigration practitioners have a good template for an ICE Motion to Grant Parole,” sought the lawyer.
“Currently have a client, detained in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody that is on the brink of killing himself.
I do not say that lightly. He calls me 7 times a day. I have to put hundreds of dollars on his telephone account at the jail facility because a) it is SO expensive b) he calls non-stop and cries and cries and cries. It is pure heartbreak,” she added.
The lawyer said that ICE threatened to beat him up, shouted at him aggressively in a language he did not speak and were humiliating him with constant body searches after he was their custody and clearly have be thoroughly searched.
“They broke him and he confessed to some non-sense based on ZERO evidence except this coerced interrogation after ICE promised all kinds of things,” reads the lawyer’s statement.
The detainee was taken to the worst Immigration Detention Facilities in New Jersey, said Boukadoum adding that he got a parole hearing.
Despite Bangladesh is not on the list of travel ban in the USA, a few numbers of Bangladeshi nationals have reportedly faced harassment at the airport amid a worldwide protest against Donald Trump’s executive order for immigration ban for seven Muslim nations.
