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It was almost midnight when I received the call from my cousin. She was crying so hard into the phone that she could barely get the words out. My aging aunt and uncle, who were living in Virginia, had been taken away by the police.
My father and his family are from Afghanistan, part of a tiny Sikh minority who have lived in Kabul for generations. Most of those who live in the United States are naturalized citizens. They were among the tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who fled to the United States in the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan war.
But my aunt and uncle didn't flee. They stuck it out in Kabul, until one day, years later, Taliban soldiers came to their house and brutally beat them in front of their 10-year-old son. From then on, they feared for their lives as Sikhs under a regime that increasingly threatened religious minorities. They worried that their son would eventually be forced into military service or killed. So in 1997, they, too, fled to the United States. They were allowed in as applicants for asylum.
On June 22, 2005, my aunt and uncle were preparing a meal to celebrate the graduation of their son from high school. The occasion was a shining achievement in this new country. There was the promise of a decent income and maybe even the glimmer of college in the future for their son. My grey haired aunt was in the kitchen, filling their tiny apartment with the smell of traditional Afghan food: fried boolani stuffed with leeks; baked rice filled with soft morsels of lamb and raisins; and sweet sugary desserts tinged with rose water. My uncle was on the telephone, seeing if relatives needed a ride to come to the house. And my cousin was answering a knock at the door.
Outside, he found three police officers from the Department of Homeland Security. They told my cousin that they needed to take his parents in for questioning, and escorted my aunt and uncle out of the house, leaving food congealing in the skillet on the stove and bright balloons still taped to the wall. The police officers told my cousin not to worry. They would bring his parents back in two hours.
Two hours passed. And then two hours more. And then my panicked cousin started making phone calls.
My phone rang later that night. At that moment, everything that had been life simply stopped, for me and the rest of my extended family.
For two terrifying days, we couldn't find out any information about what had happened to my aunt and uncle. Various members of my family kept repeating, over and over: this does not happen in the United States. The police do not come and take people in the middle of the night. It was inconceivable to all of us, that my aunt and uncle had come all the way to this country just to disappear like they were always afraid would happen to them in Afghanistan.
My uncle was finally able to call his son two days after his arrest. He didn't know what state he was in, but he provided a phone number for the jail, which we learned was in northern Virginia.
My aunt and uncle were arrested because their asylum case had been denied. The Taliban was no longer in power, and the judge ruled that it was therefore safe for them to return home. Their lawyer was trying to appeal the case, arguing that Afghanistan was still not a safe place for religious minorities. My aunt and uncle were in legal limbo, caught up in a Homeland Security sweep. We were told they could be kept in prison indefinitely, without charges, and without much legal recourse. Our lawyers said there was no guarantee they would ever get out, and that if they were released, it would only be under deportation orders.
Our family was lucky. We had the rare miracle happen: my aunt and uncle were released.
But two years later, the threat of arrest or deportation still looms large, as my aunt and uncle continue to quietly create that decent life for their son that they came here for. They've gained back the ten pounds they lost while in prison, and have tried to forget that month they spent behind bars.
And they still love this country in the way that perhaps is only possible when you are grateful for every day spent here, when you know that at any moment you could be forced to leave.
During their imprisonment I looked at photos of my aunt and uncle every day and cried. I was especially worried about my aunt, who was already very ill. In prison, she was separated from her husband for the first time since she had married him, some 40 years before. She was so frightened by the possibility that she would never see her son again that she stopped eating or sleeping and spent her days weeping.
I was convinced that either prison or deportation would mean a death sentence for these two people whom I loved, and who I had visited just weeks before their arrest.
I ran the memories of that visit through my head time and time again. There was my aunt, feeding me cardamom and sugar-laced almonds from her hand, asking me, worried, when I was finally going to get married. There was my shy uncle, hugging his son, telling him how proud he was to have a child who would soon be graduating from high school.
And I still cringe every time my phone rings late at night, fearing that any day, I could get a call saying that there was another knock on my aund and uncle's door, and that this time they're gone forever.