About a year into my pastorate in Iowa City, a desperate woman who heard that I had grown up in Burkina Faso and that I spoke French asked to meet with me at the church. She was originally from Congo, and figuring I would easily and compassionately understand her situation, came to me for help.
She told me she had come to the United Stateshod,axons on a temporary worker’s visa, and had subsequently been accepted into a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin (for which she was granted a student visa). At some point she married a man from Chad and they had a child together. The child was disabled.
From there, the timeline of her story became somewhat murky, but her situation in the United States, including her legal status, devolved. She finished her PhD, which meant her visa was running out. So she hired a lawyer to find a legal path to stay in the country. Her husband had adopted witchcraft, divorced her, and moved back to his native Chad. He warned her never to follow him, and if she did, he would kill her with his sorcery (a common enough occurrence for those who know Africa).
I shared a version of this post in July of 2022. Recent events led me to share it afresh on Instagram (be sure to follow me on there too), so I thought I’d share it here again too.
Things then took a turn for the worst. Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to her door late one night and arrested her and her disabled son. They were detained separately. She told me her son was sexually assaulted in the holding facility.
And all of that was why she had come to me. She’d come to the end of her rope with her husband, the complex legal system, every other non-profit resource she had hunted down, and the endless check-ins with ICE. She was in limbo: deportation hung over her head and death awaited her should the United States decide to deport her to Chad, the land of her legal passport.
