“Look at the wall!” he remembered one of the agents shouting. Musa was having difficulty holding his head up and his eyes open. “Lift up your head and look at the wall when we ask you questions!”
“Did you help the Tsarnaev brothers plan the bombing?” he remembered one of the agents asking.
“I freaked out,” he told me a couple of weeks later. “I tore the wires off me and said, ‘You can’t treat me like a criminal. This is the last time I set foot in this building. You can arrest me if you want, you can never give me a green card if you want, but I’m going home now.’”
“You can’t,” he remembered an agent saying. “Your apartment is being searched right now.” He also remembered being told that his refugee status would be revoked and he would be deported. At this point, Musa felt that he no longer cared: he wheeled himself out of the FBI office.
MUSA, like other Boston-area Chechens, and like Almut Rochowanski, who was trying to help them, was just beginning to discover how, exactly, law enforcement casts a wide net in the age of the War on Terror. “This is what they [the FBI] do,” Rochowanski told me. “The policy priority is to get as many of them [aliens] out of the country as possible. You would think you’d want to keep them where you could watch them, but I don’t know, I’m not a policy expert for Homeland Security.”
Indeed, for nearly thirty years the main threat American law enforcement has used against aliens suspected of supporting terrorism has been deportation. It has remained the weapon of choice even in the dozen years since the September 11 attacks showed clearly that a terrorist attack on the United States could be planned and directed from overseas. From a policy or strategic standpoint, deporting suspected terrorist supporters to countries that are themselves suspected of supporting terrorism makes no sense. But it suits the bigger imagination of the War on Terror, in which terrorists are larger than life and have America under siege.
Ten
THE STRANGE DEATH OF IBRAGIM TODASHEV
On May 1, 2013, twenty-four-year-old Reni Manukyan landed at JFK Airport in New York. She had been traveling for a while: a two-hour flight to Moscow from a southern Russian city where she had been visiting cousins, then the ten-hour flight to New York, and now she had to recheck her luggage for the final leg to Atlanta. But before she could get her bags, the Homeland Security officer at passport control instructed her to follow another officer to a room off the giant baggage hall. The room is large and windowless, and at any given time three or four officers are seated behind metal desks there, talking to passengers who have just arrived from some foreign country, while other similarly inconvenienced passengers wait their turn in stiff plastic chairs. The space is eerily bright and still; the optimistic din of the arrivals hall disappears the moment an officer shuts the heavy door. The use of any electronic devices is forbidden. People spend their time waiting with nothing to distract them from the dread of not being allowed to enter the country.
A few minutes after Reni was led in, the door closed behind a woman wearing a hijab, and Reni knew why she was here: “What, are you taking all the Muslims off their flights?” she snapped at the officers. Reni herself was wearing a tracksuit and a simple black-and-white-patterned scarf on her head—she liked to be comfortable when she traveled—but in her passport picture, taken soon after she converted to Islam in the summer of 2010, she was fully covered. That must have been what drew the officer’s attention, because nothing else about Reni could arouse suspicion. She was born in Russia but had lived in the United States since she was a teenager; her mother was serving in the U.S. Army; Reni herself had a good steady job as an assistant housekeeper at a big chain hotel in Atlanta; and she traveled back to Russia to visit relatives with some regularity.
It was not too long before one of the officers motioned Reni over to his desk and started asking questions. He wanted to know where she had been. Reni had gone to Russia for a cousin’s wedding—she had left Atlanta on April 16. Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the officer asked a great many detailed questions about her mundane and limited travels in Russia during the previous two weeks. Then he asked her if she knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Reni said she did not. The officer insisted that she knew him, and she equally adamantly insisted that she did not.
“Who is Ibragim Todashev?” the officer asked then.
“Why? Did he do something?” Reni asked back.
“What do you mean?” the officer asked. “What could he have done? Why did you ask that? What do you think he would have done?”
Reni had asked the question because she was not taking any of this very seriously. It was not until later that she realized that “you should never joke with them.” Ibragim Todashev was her husband. They had married in July 2010, after knowing each other for a couple of months—this was why Reni had converted to Islam. Ibragim had moved from Boston to Atlanta to live with her, but after a bit less than a year she grew tired of supporting him while he did nothing but the “brainless sports” in which he competed, namely mixed martial arts. They moved to Orlando together, thinking that the Chechen community there would make it easier for him to find a job, but there they split up and Reni moved back to Atlanta, although subsequently they had made up and split up and maybe made up again, eventually settling into a comfortable pattern of talking on the phone every day and spending every other weekend or so together.
So what bad things could Ibragim have done? He could have cheated on Reni. He could have gotten into a fight—that had happened a few times, and once, a couple of months before they met, he had been arrested in downtown Boston for attacking a driver who he thought had hurled an insult that mentioned Ibragim’s mother. Reni was not all that surprised by these fights: as she saw it, Americans and Russians—especially Russians from Chechnya, where Ibragim was born—just drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in different places. Chechens saw an insult as no less a transgression than a blow, and as far as a Chechen was concerned, an American who shouted an obscenity was spoiling for a fight. Sometimes Reni thought Ibragim might have been better off staying home and mooching off her than roaming the streets and getting into fights with Americans, who were liable to call the police, who in turn were liable to think a loose cannon like Ibragim—a professional martial artist to boot—should be kept under lock and key. Reni, who was not Chechen and who had spent the last two weeks with relatives in Russia, had no idea of the hold the very idea of a Chechen martial artist had taken on the American imagination in that time.
Reni spent five hours in that room, answering questions that made little sense to her. Her plane had left by the time she came out. She dialed Ibragim, who explained that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was his friend Tamerlan from Boston. Reni had never met him, but Ibragim had mentioned him and she had talked to him once or twice when she answered Ibragim’s phone.
“Tell them what you know,” Ibragim instructed her. “Don’t try to hide anything. I’ll tell you more when I see you.”
The next morning two FBI agents were waiting for Reni when she came to work. They had another circular conversation. A week later, Ibragim came to visit: he drove up on Thursday and back the following day. He told Reni that all the Chechens in Boston and Orlando were getting dragged in for questioning. The day he left, the FBI agents came again. This time Reni decided she had something to say about Tamerlan.
“If you ask me, I’m going to tell you, I don’t think he did it.” She really was starting to think that maybe, like some of the American Chechens were saying, the Tsarnaev brothers had been set up. People were starting to point out some inconsistencies in the FBI’s story—but even more, the ongoing siege of the Chechen community made it feel like they were the ones under attack.