LOWELL — When Ihsanullah Garay was delivering food on Sept. 14, he found himself struggling to find the Starbucks he was being sent to pick up from in Methuen.
He asked the first people he saw for directions, a man and a woman sitting in a car. The man pointed Garay in the right direction, he told The Sun Monday morning, and Garay thanked him and started walking away. Then, the two people started asking Garay questions about his nationality, and where he was born. Garay is from Afghanistan, arriving in the U.S. in the spring of 2021 on a student visa to get a doctorate in finance.
“I said, ‘Brother, this is not related to you. You helped me, I said thank you, that’s it,’” Garay said.
Garay then tried to walk away, but he said the man shouted at him, and continued questioning Garay’s nationality, while Garay maintained that he was in the country legally.
After more back and forth, Garay said the man finally identified himself as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and ask him to produce identification, which Garay had in his car, along with an ID badge from a former job.
Garay was soon placed in handcuffs, beginning a more than monthlong ordeal in ICE custody that brought him to three different ICE facilities in three states before he was released on bond last month. After he arrived back in Lowell, where he has been living with his cousin, Abdul Ahad Storay, Garay took some time to settle and work to get back on track with his ongoing treatment for brain cancer.
On Monday, he sat down with The Sun in Storay’s computer store in Downtown Lowell to give his firsthand account of his experience.
Garay said that when he was placed in handcuffs, he tried to explain his situation to the ICE agents, to no avail.
“I said, ‘What are you doing? I have brain cancer. I have a work permit, I have Social Security, I have everything. What are you doing?’ He said nothing,” said Garay.
Garay’s first stop was the ICE field office in Burlington, where many of those detained by the agency in Greater Lowell are being brought. Since the spring, allegations of extremely poor conditions inside the building have been made by detainees and their attorneys, as it is designed primarily as an office building, not a long-term detention facility.
Garay could not speak much to the conditions inside, as he said he was only at the facility for roughly an hour before he was transferred to another facility in Rhode Island. In that short time, though, Garay said he was asked by ICE officials for proof that he has brain cancer, which he was able to show them through his MyChart app when they brought him his phone, which they had confiscated along with his ID and other belongings. When the ICE officials saw the medical documents, Garay said they seemed shocked he was telling the truth.
While still in Burlington, Garay said he suffered a couple medical episodes which lasted about two minutes, though he was unsure whether these were seizures or something else stemming from his brain cancer.
Garay spent about 28 days in the facility in Rhode Island, and at one point he said similar medical episodes would occur on a near nightly basis, bringing him to the point of needing a wheelchair to move around, but the medical care available at the facility was not sufficient, he said. After he was moved to Georgia, where he was given the Oct. 21 court hearing that resulted in his release, Garay said he experienced more of the same.
“They have no neurosurgeon, they have no oncologist, they have no neurologist, nothing,” said Garay.
Through all of this, Garay was missing key appointments in the course of his cancer treatment. He was supposed to start a new medication at a Sept. 24 appointment at Boston Medical Center, but he missed it while in custody and was not able to start the medication on time. Even after reaching out to his doctors, Garay said the medicine did not arrive before he was moved to Georgia. In the meantime, he said he was prescribed Keppra, an anti-seizure medication he was supposed to take in the morning and evening, but it was only ever brought to him for the night dose while he was in Rhode Island.
In Georgia, Garay said he saw a slight improvement to that end, as they gave him both daily doses of the anti-seizure medication, though at that facility he still lacked the medical care he needed.
After he was released on bond, the police brought Garay to the airport, where he was denied boarding because his identification had been taken by ICE in Massachusetts, despite reassurance from the police and ICE he would be allowed on the plane.
After Storay called local police to help his cousin, Garay was brought to Jacksonville, Florida, where he got on a bus for the multi-day journey back north to Lowell.
Now home, Garay is doing much better. He is able to walk around without the need for a wheelchair, and his cancer treatment is moving back on track after he met with his doctors at the end of October. His next appointment is an MRI at Boston Medical Center later this month, and he has multiple other appointments scheduled with his doctors before the end of the year.
Still, his ICE ordeal continues with a court hearing on Dec. 11 in Georgia, but Garay and his attorneys are working on getting it moved up to Massachusetts. He hopes to remain in the U.S., not only because of his ongoing medical treatment, but also because both he and Storay, himself a U.S. citizen, would not be safe returning to Afghanistan, which fell back to Taliban control in 2021, months after Garay left the country.
As his home country fell, and the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its military forces, Garay applied for asylum that August on top of his student visa, fearing what would happen to him if he were to return.
“If the U.S. will give me nationality, I will accept it. If not, I will go somewhere else,” said Garay. “When the Taliban suddenly came, I had no choice but to apply for asylum.”
Garay’s asylum case has been pending ever since. So when Temporary Protected Status was offered to Afghan citizens living in the U.S. the following spring after the Taliban retook control, Garay did not apply for TPS due to his open asylum case. TPS for Afghanistan was terminated in July this year.
“They (ICE) told me my visa expired in September 2021. I asked them how this was possible when I came in April,” said Garay.
Even without the Taliban, Garay said he could not return because Afghanistan lacks the medical infrastructure he needs to treat his cancer.
Now that he is back in Lowell, Garay is looking for other work that is not food delivery.
In addition to delivering food, Garay said he had been working at Lahey Hospital as a receptionist, but he left that job just a couple weeks before his arrest after they could not give him enough hours.
Friends of Garay also left Afghanistan after he did, but some went to Canada, he said, and once there they asked him to join them.
“I said no … I don’t want to be in some country illegally, so that is why I am here,” said Garay.
Garay credited Storay for getting him back to Lowell.
“He knows my situation. Nobody can even imagine my situation … He also knows what he has been spending on me. Only he knows,” said Garay.
An ICE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Friday. When previously asked about Garay’s case in October, ICE Boston spokesperson James Covington said in a statement Garay is “an illegal alien from Afghanistan,” and claimed he lawfully entered the U.S. in April 2021 with permission to remain until Sept. 7, 2021.
“However, he violated the terms of his lawful admission when he refused to leave the country. Garay will remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his removal proceedings,” Covington said in the Oct. 11 statement.
In addition to Garay’s current work permit, Storay was also able to show The Sun Garay’s original student visa, which was issued in April 2021 and expired one year later, seven months after Covington claimed it did.
