By Daniel Vela
On August 7, 2025, Nael Shamma, a decades-long resident of Genesee County, became a target of the federal government’s push for deportations.
“I picked up my coffee from Tim Horton’s and drove away,” he later explained to East Village Magazine (EVM). “At the turn of the light by my house some police lights came on, and I was wondering, ‘What’s going on? I didn’t do nothing wrong.’”
That answer is something Shamma, now having spent over two months in detention at the privately-owned North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, is still seeking to understand.
Shamma pulled over, and soon his car was surrounded by multiple vehicles. He said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents then approached him with guns drawn before he was handcuffed and taken to Detroit for processing without any explanation of why he was being detained.
In a September phone interview, Shamma, 58, said the experience made him feel like he was “on America’s most wanted or something” and “it didn’t make sense” when just a few months prior he had reported for his regular check in with the immigration office.
Shamma has been in the United States since 1973. He was born in Palestine and told EVM he entered the U.S. legally, on a green card, with his family when he was just seven years old.
Since then, he has operated, owned, or worked at several local convenience stores throughout his life in Genesee County. He also helps his wife, Christina Shamma, run her own cleaning business at times.
Shamma said he met Christina, who is from Holly, Michigan, in 2003. They married in 2013 and have built a happy life over the years, raising their four children together.
In a separate interview, Christina described her husband as a hard worker and a family man.
“We went in in May,” she explained of her and her husband’s last encounter with ICE prior to Shamma’s August detention. “He reported in May, and they told him everything was fine, he didn’t need to do anything. And then August 7 goes around, and they do this.”
As she spoke, her voice caught in her throat as she held back tears, calling Shamma “loving, caring, my best friend, the best father and grandfather.”
Due to a serious crime Shamma committed in 1983 in Chicago, where his family originally settled, he has been under supervision and required to check in with ICE periodically for decades.
Shamma said he had served six and a half years for that crime, which he described as a “self-defense stabbing case,” but he noted that though he’d completed prison time for his past mistake, it still leaves him vulnerable to deportation.
Shamma told EVM that he has had an order of removal since his release from prison in 1989. He said that ICE attempted to deport him to Palestine right after his release, however Palestine would not accept him. He said there was another attempt to deport him in 2012, this time to Jordan, with the same result.
Now in 2025, after 51 years in the United States, he said he’s being told that they are now attempting to deport him to Israel.
“I was born in Palestine, and they’re trying to send me to Israel,” Shamma said, his confusion and fear palpable even over the phone. “I don’t know nobody in that country. I do not have a home in that country. I do not have no family in that country. I was born in Palestine, and there’s no more Palestine. There’s genocide that’s happening in Palestine.”
Both Shamma and his wife said he has not been in any trouble with the law since his release from prison over thirty years ago, and neither understands why Shamma has been detained and is possibly being deported to a country in the midst of a tenuous peace agreement with the country he was born in.
According to an estimate by the Flint Alliance for Immigration Rights (FAIR), a coalition committed to collective action in support of immigrant communities across the Greater Flint region, more than 50 people have been detained by ICE in Genesee County since May 2025.
“That number comes directly from what we are seeing and hearing in the community,” a FAIR media representative told EVM over email.
Some of those detentions may have been supported through voluntary agreements between ICE and local law enforcement, such as 287(g) task force agreements.
According to ICE, the 287(g) agreement is a task force model that:
“…serves as a force multiplier by allowing state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce limited immigration authority during routine police enforcement duties. The model allows state and local agencies to carry out immigration enforcement activities in non-custodial settings while under ICE supervision and oversight.”
Here in Michigan, seven law enforcement agencies have signed such an agreement with ICE.
One of those agencies is the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, a combination of departments and shared resources between Mundy Township and Swartz Creek since 2017. (Shamma was detained near his home in Burton, however, and Burton’s mayor did not respond to EVM’s request to learn whether local law enforcement worked with ICE on Shamma’s detention.)
In a phone interview with Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson, EVM asked if his department had any sort of agreement with ICE to supplement or support their detention efforts in Genesee County. Sheriff Swanson said no, nor are there any plans in the future for any agreements with ICE. He added that his department will continue working with all federal agencies the way they always have.
FAIR’s representative told EVM that an agreement like the 287(g) “creates fear and distrust, especially among families already marginalized, and discourages people from calling the police, even in emergencies. These programs have historically led to racial profiling and civil rights violations in other communities across the country, and we are concerned about similar outcomes here.”
While the politics of immigration continue to play out nationally and locally, Shamma sits in a two-man cell in Baldwin, awaiting answers about his fate.
“No matter what we’re doing here, we cannot get no answers from nobody about anything,” he said before speculating on his possible outcomes as a Palestinian man who may end up in Israel.
“Either they’re going to put me back on supervision, or they’re going to send me to a country I don’t know nothing about… It’s like, okay honestly, just kill me before I go then.”
ICE did not respond to EVM’s request to learn why Shamma had been arrested on August 7. Shamma’s case also does not appear to be docketed for review in immigration court according to publicly available information from the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared in East Village Magazine’s October 2025 issue. Since publication, President Donald Trump declared a peace deal had been reached between Palestine and Israel. The article originally noted that Palestine and Israel were at war. It has been edited to acknowledge the peace agreement President Trump announced on Monday, October 13, 2025.
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