Asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries disproportionately imprisoned at Texas border
Each time he escaped danger on the journey that would eventually bring him to California, Shamsuddin Shams made sure to video-chat with his mother. She liked it that way — to not only hear his voice but see his face, even if it betrayed anguish and fear.
She saw him after he fled his native Afghanistan for good and rode into Pakistan, after he stepped past human remains while crossing the jungles of Panama, and after he escaped, in the city of Tapachula at the southern tip of Mexico, from gunmen who demanded he give up everything he had not already lost.
But when Shams, who is 25, found himself in a Texas detention facility, facing prison time for an obscure federal crime, he made a phone call instead.
“Why can’t I see your face?” his mother asked.
“I’m in a camp. I’m safe,” he lied. “The internet where I am is not working.”
“You always used to talk to me on video,” she replied.
She was incredulous, but Shams found he could keep up the charade. And so he did, for eight months, figuring a son’s deceit was more palatable than a mother’s worry.
Shams had been snared by a previously unreported federal effort that disproportionately locked up migrants from Muslim-majority countries for the obscure crime of failing to cross the border at a formal checkpoint and report to a customs office.
The charge, conceived decades ago to fight drug trafficking, carries a maximum sentence of one year, double the length of the more well-known charge of illegal entry, which carries a top-end sentence of six months.
