By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 9, 2003; Page C01
[Never, never ever do a photo op with George W. Bush!!]
On March 14, when President Bush was seeking international support for an invasion of Iraq, he summoned Iraqi exile Katrin Michael to a meeting in the Oval Office, where she recounted her horrific story of being gassed by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1987.
That day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher both used the meeting as an opportunity to issue statements attacking Hussein for his use of chemical weapons. And Michael told her story on National Public Radio and ABC-TV.
A week later -- on March 21, the day after the war began -- Michael received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanding that she report to a deportation officer.
"I was scared, I got crazy," says Michael, 53, who works as a translator for the Iraq Foundation in Washington. "I asked the deportation officer, 'You're going to deport me in this war situation?' And he said, 'No, you should be detained.' I said, 'I met President Bush last week and now I'll be in jail in America?' "
This morning, Michael is scheduled to meet with her deportation officer. "I'm going to take a picture of me with President Bush and show it to him," she says.
The White House declines to discuss Michael or the deportation action against her. A White House press officer referred inquiries to the National Security Council, which referred inquiries to the State Department, which referred inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security, where Greg Gagne, spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, uttered this on-the-record comment:
"We don't discuss these things."
Michael's deportation problem is just the latest crisis in a life filled with turmoil and horror. She was born in 1950 in northern Iraq, a member of the Assyrian Christian minority in that predominantly Muslim nation. During her childhood, she says, her father, an oil company auditor, was jailed several times for his political activities in support of equal rights for Christians. At 14 she, too, was briefly jailed, she says, accused of smuggling food and information to her father, who was in hiding.
<snip>
That night she called her brother Basil, who lives in Toronto with her mother. "When I walked into the Oval Office," she remembers telling him, "it was like a dream."
The rude awakening came a week later, when she received the letter demanding that she report to a "deportation officer." Stunned, she called the officer and learned that her asylum appeal had been rejected by the Board of Immigration Appeals in December.
She contacted Riva Khoshaba, a Washington lawyer who is the daughter of her old Mosul University friend Audisho Khoshaba.
"She was pretty scared," says Riva Khoshaba, who agreed to take her case without charge. "This is a pretty scary thing for someone who has been a refugee for 20 years."
Khoshaba hopes to reopen Michael's case, and she has enlisted the aid of veteran Chicago immigration attorney Robert De Kelaita.
"This woman should not be deported or detained," De Kelaita says. "This could be very embarrassing for the Bush administration. It could spark an interesting debate in the Arab world over how Iraqis are treated in the U.S. and what democracy will be like in Iraq."
Michael admits that she's a little scared about the prospect of deportation. She'd like to return to Iraq eventually, she says, but she worries about her safety there now.
"Where should I go?" she asks. "Should I travel to Iraq? I give you a question: Where should I go?"
