This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report, as we turn to a horrifying story out of Buffalo, New York—it has sent shockwaves through the community—where a disabled Rohingya refugee from Burma, also known as Myanmar, was found dead five days after he was abandoned by Border Patrol agents about five miles from his home.
56-year-old Nurul Amin Shah Alam was mostly blind, spoke no English, in the country legally. His family told reporters no one at the Department of Homeland Security warned them or his lawyers that he had been released from jail last Thursday and dropped off alone outside a closed coffee shop on a cold winter night. He wandered around in orange booties issued by the Erie County Holding Center for days before Buffalo police found his dead body on Tuesday. Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan excoriated CBP at a press conference Thursday.
MAYOR SEAN RYAN: I issued an order a few weeks ago saying the Buffalo Police Department will not interact or help the Department of Homeland Security in their civil immigration enforcement actions. The incident that we are talking about makes it so of course we should, because the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol and ICE, they don’t know what they are doing.
And it has been demonstrated. A Border Patrol agent picked up this man from the Holding Center custody, drove him to an ICE facility, and the ICE facility said, “We don’t want this guy.” Then the Border Patrol officers had no protocol of what to do with a disabled man who doesn’t speak English, who was confused and lost. And you know what they did? They dropped him at a closed coffee shop. That’s why we do not cooperate with ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Buffalo mayor. As congressional leaders and others across New York demand answers, calls for an investigation into the Border Patrol are growing louder. For more we’re joined from Buffalo by J. Dale Shoemaker, a reporter for Investigative Post, who has been closely following this story and attended Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s funeral yesterday. Thank you so much for being with us. Can you explain how this happened? His family did not know that Customs and Border Patrol had left him in the cold at night, and he died there?
J. DALE SHOEMAKER: The key issue here seems to be a miscommunication—on whose part we’re still trying to figure out—as to which immigration agency was going to take custody of Mr. Shah Alam after he was released from the holding center. His attorneys believed it was ICE who was going to take custody of him and so they were waiting for him at the local ICE detention center the next day to get him out. His attorneys had confirmed, in fact, that ICE did not want custody of him. ICE’s attorney said, “We don’t want this guy.”
In fact it was Border Patrol who the Erie County Sheriff’s Office called. They took him in their system, saw that ICE didn’t want to have custody of him, and then instead of, in their words, releasing him from the Border Patrol station, gave him a quote-unquote “courtesy ride” to the closed Tim Hortons. My colleague was there the other day and confirmed that while the drive-thru of that coffee shop was open, the lobby was not. He was not able to enter and sit down in the quote-unquote “warm, safe location” that Border Patrol said it was.
He then wandered the city for several days. When the 911 call came in, the woman who called said that she had seen him three hours earlier alive but did not call until three hours later when he was dead. This is somewhat ironic because Buffalo calls itself the “City of Good Neighbors” yet there were many people over the course of those five days who saw him, perhaps even interacted with him, and did nothing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dale, this was a person who was a refugee in the country? What have you been able to tell about why he was jailed for a year originally?
J. DALE SHOEMAKER: This is a tragic situation. He was resettled in Buffalo by one of our refugee resettlement agencies. He was living in Malaysia for a period of about a decade, I am told, before eventually being allowed into the United States as a legal refugee in December 2024. Now as I’m sure you know, the winters in Buffalo are pretty cold and he was used to warmer climates. So he and his family were cooped up in their new home in Buffalo for several weeks.
We had a sunny day in February last year and he decided to venture outside for a walk. He is nearly blind. He has got totally no vision in one eye and he has partial a little bit blurry vision in another eye. He sets out for a walk in his neighborhood in the West Side of Buffalo and makes his way to a store where he purchases a curtain rod to use as a walking stick.
When the weather turned bad, he got lost in the neighborhood, which again he was new to. He ends up in the backyard of a woman on Tonawanda Street. When he’s there, the woman thinks he’s breaking in. She says he let the dog out when he went into the backyard. Police roll up and they come in hot. We got the body camera footage yesterday showing that the moment that officers arrive they are screaming at him to drop his weapon—that’s his curtain rod—and to submit for arrest, basically. They, in the body camera footage that we reviewed, say after he is in handcuffs that they nearly pulled out their guns and shot him.
He is then charged with assault. He again speaks no English so he had no idea what was going on. He had no idea where he was or what these officers were ordering him to do. So once he is on the ground with these officers, he does bite them at one point and he gets charged with assault. He is taken to the jail.
At that time, the attorneys and the family agree that if he was bailed out at that point in time, ICE would take custody of him and he might get disappeared into the ICE detention system in the United States or possibly even deported to a country that he was not familiar with. Instead of letting that—
AMY GOODMAN: Dale, we just have 30 seconds. Your final words?
J. DALE SHOEMAKER: Instead of letting him get bailed out, they let him sit there. He pleads out earlier this year and that is when the issue with Border Patrol happens. They pick him up with no notice, no warning, and they drop him at the coffee shop. And [INAUDIBLE]—
AMY GOODMAN: His family reported him missing, and the next thing they knew he was found dead in the cold. J. Dale Shoemaker, we want to thank you for being with us, reporter for Investigative Post. We will link to your piece headlined Blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol is dead. Dale attended Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s funeral on Thursday.
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