TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT: TOSSED OUT OF AMERICA

Families fearing deportation flee north, hoping to take advantage of Canada's more accommodating policies. But a pending pact with the U.S. soon will close that door.

By Flynn McRoberts, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune national correspondent Cam Simpson contributed to this report

On the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Shakeel Ahmed loaded his wife and five children into the family's green 1994 Mercury mini-van, their years in America reduced to a pair of cardboard boxes stuffed with children's clothes.

The rest they left behind: a television, furniture, pots and pans, blankets and pillows. Ahmed figured he had little time to waste because word had spread through the sweet shops and mosques around Devon Avenue, the heart of Chicago's South Asian community, that the federal government was deporting illegal immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries.

As he drove down Devon for the last time, Ahmed's thoughts turned to a cabdriver friend who had left with his family just two days before. Another companion they'd played cricket with in Washington Park had left months earlier.

Now it was his turn.

"I never cry in my life," he said. "The day I left Chicago, tears came out of my eyes."

And so the Ahmeds joined the vanguard of those fleeing America, not only from Devon but from Warren Road in Dearborn, Mich., Coney Island Avenue in
Brooklyn and the other main streets of America's Muslim and Arab enclaves.

Federal officials saw this as a bonus: immigration enforcement, free of charge to U.S. taxpayers.

But the targeting of men from Muslim countries in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks affected more than just the men who were deported and their families. It sent
aftershocks rumbling through the American neighborhoods where they lived and, in many cases, thrived.

Central to the crackdown were initiatives to find those who had outstanding deportation orders and to require men from predominantly Muslim countries to register
with immigration authorities. Government officials say they are targeting nations where terrorists operate, not Muslims, and contend that with national security a
priority after the attacks, the measures were justified.

In the months that followed the Ahmeds' departure, the smattering of those fleeing became an exodus. Many of these people had seen others heed the pleas of
community activists to register, only to have husbands, brothers and sons detained and eventually deported.

The government's campaign drove families by the thousands to leave all they had built in America--selling medical practices, gas stations, restaurants, homes and
furniture for whatever they could get.

Many returned to the countries from which they came. Many others, desperate not to return to their homelands, packed their worldly possessions into cars and vans
and made their way to Canada.

In the winter cold, family after family poured into overwhelmed shelters in border cities such as Buffalo and Detroit and refugee agencies in places like northern
Vermont.

From January through March of this year, 2,763 Pakistani nationals filed claims for refugee protection with Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, more than a
fourfold increase from the 671 claims filed in the first three months of 2002.

Their reasoning was simple: Under Canadian law, foreign visitors have more rights than they would in the U.S. Families awaiting immigration hearings in Canada get
basic medical care, help finding jobs and other assistance. In the U.S., many Muslim men have awaited immigration hearings behind bars.

"With special registration and all the other crackdowns, there's a climate of fear," said Elizabeth Woike, assistant director of Vive La Casa, a refugee center in
Buffalo whose reputation for helping immigrants stretches as far as Nepal. "People feel if they ask for asylum in the U.S., they don't think they'll get a fair hearing,
particularly if you're a Muslim man."

But Canada won't be so inviting much longer. Under a pending pact with Washington called the Safe Third Country Agreement, the Canadian government in coming
months will make it much more difficult for refugees to enter from the U.S.

Refugee agencies predict that, coming as a second American registration deadline for men from Muslim countries nears, the border clampdown could set off another
run to the border. Only this time, the door will be locked.

As Jean-Pierre Morin, a spokesman for Canada's Citizenship and Immigration agency, put it, "They're going to be turned back."

Even U.S. citizens flee

Most years, hundreds of Bangladeshis line Devon Avenue in March to celebrate their homeland's independence from Pakistan in 1971. But this year, just dozens
showed up: The celebration fell shortly before the deadline for men from Bangladesh and several other predominantly Muslim countries to register with the federal
government.

An even more startling barometer of the fear that had swept over Chicago's Muslim community came a few months later. Roughly 20,000 Pakistanis typically jam
either side of Devon each August to mark the independence of Pakistan. This year, no more than 8,000 showed up.

The sparse turnout of the parades, community leaders believe, reflected the departure of many families and the anxiety of those who remained.

Missing were not only those who had fled to Canada but thousands more who voluntarily returned to Pakistan.

And it wasn't just those who were living illegally in the U.S., having overstayed visas or ignored deportation orders. Such was the fear and panic that swept along
Devon and other Muslim and Arab enclaves that even green-card holders and naturalized U.S. citizens fled, worried they might be targeted next.

The fallout from that exodus can be seen in empty apartments, vacant storefronts and short lines at the cash registers of local businesses.

"Totally dead, nobody here," said Sayed Kazmi, the owner of a Devon Avenue women's clothing boutique who first noticed the drop-off in customers about a month
after the March 21 registration deadline for Pakistanis. "Mostly, they run away to Canada."

The Ahmeds were among them, even though they feared that by leaving Chicago their son's medical care would suffer. Doctors in the Middle East had given Shakeel
Ahmed's first child, Usman, little chance of a normal life after he was born with cerebral palsy. His legs were so twisted that he barely could stand on his own, let
alone walk.

But in March 1996, his father obtained a U.S. visitor's visa, and the family came to Chicago for a second opinion. Ahmed worked as a self-employed handyman and
electrician.

After surgery and eight months of therapy at Children's Memorial Hospital, Usman was able to walk on his own, climb stairs, even kick a ball. When he and his
physical therapist, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, would walk the hospital's white-tiled basement hallways, Usman would stop people and say: "Hey, I know how to walk. You
wanna race?"

But his father's visa, which a lawyer helped Ahmed renew several times, expired in 2000. By then his household had three American citizens--girls born to his wife in
Chicago hospitals.

There was no point in him applying for a green card because he had no grounds for doing so. He had little choice but to hope that U.S. policymakers would offer a
new round of amnesty for undocumented workers.

Sept. 11 changed all that, with calls to toughen rather than ease immigration restrictions.

Ahmed turned to Christopher Helt, a Chicago attorney who had won an earlier political asylum case using the novel argument that the lack of medical attention
available to an autistic child from Pakistan rose to the level of persecution of a protected class.

In February 2002, Helt got Usman's story on the "CBS Evening News." Soon after that, an immigration judge in Chicago set an October hearing to consider
Usman's application for political asylum.

With the hearing five weeks away, though, Ahmed decided he couldn't risk losing in court and being deported. Painful as the decision was--with Usman on the verge
of gaining physical independence--he chose to flee to Canada.

An open house

Last winter, so many Pakistani families had raced north along America's highways that crossings like the one at Lacolle, Quebec, near the Vermont border, were
overwhelmed. Canadian immigration authorities, unprepared for the crush of people, began sending them back to the U.S. side to await interviews.

The Howes of Burlington heard of the crisis and called Vermont Refugee Assistance, offering their home.

Mark Howe, 45, is the director of music at St. Paul's Cathedral in Burlington. He and his wife, Sarah, a medical writer for a diagnostic software company, felt that as
Christians they had to have "an ethic of hospitality," he said, "especially for people who are aliens in the land and don't have the same rights that citizens do."

But there was something more as well.

"We both really disagreed with this special registration thing," he said. "It seemed to both Sarah and me, for the federal government to single out people from
Pakistan and that part of the world, that was such a vile thing. And we just wanted to get in the way of that if we could."

Before long, the Howes received a call from Patrick Giantonio, director of Vermont Refugee Assistance. "There's a family coming in," he told them. "Could you
possibly put them up?"

The family--a couple with two disabled teenagers--arrived on a bus from Queens on Feb. 19. The father had been a farmer in the Northwest Frontier Province, the
Wild West of Pakistan, and several years ago brought his family to New York, where he pumped gas and did odd jobs.

They stayed in the upstairs bedroom of the Howes' home, a couple of blocks from the shore of Lake Champlain, which straddles the U.S.-Canadian border.

A few days later, Giantonio and a Salvation Army van arrived to take the family to their interview with Canadian immigration authorities at the border. By that night,
they were in Montreal.

For 16 years, Giantonio's group has been recruiting Vermonters to house the world's dispossessed.

The group has seen families scarred by the genocide of Rwanda and widows whose husbands died at the hands of the Taliban. It has become accustomed to dealing
with people fleeing Third World poverty, chaos and tyranny.

But something distinguished the droves of Pakistani families who arrived last winter, Giantonio said.

They felt they had to run for safety from the United States.

A change of faces

North of the border, refugee agencies began noticing a change in the faces coming through their doors last winter.

With thousands of Muslims fleeing America last winter, Canadian cities from Vancouver to Toronto suddenly were teeming with families desperate for one last
chance to avoid being returned to the deprivations of their homelands.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Toronto's Sojourn House saw virtually no Pakistani families at its headquarters on the second floor of a stone church building just two
blocks from a lavish Queen Street mall.

"After 9/11, it was our largest group," said Shaun Williams, an outreach worker who helps new arrivals. From January to March of this year alone, he said,
Pakistanis accounted for 54 of the 152 people served by Sojourn House.

Social workers helped them get work permits and other assistance that Canada grants to those awaiting hearings on whether they will get refugee status.

In late February, Shakil Butt walked up the battered steps of Sojourn House. The former Chicago factory worker had just spent 45 days in a Canadian detention
center after being stopped at the border crossing between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario.

The youngest of eight children, Butt, 28, came from a politically connected family in Lahore, Pakistan. After working several years in Chicago, his visa expired and
he began hearing the stories of deportations at his mosque near Devon Avenue.

So he fled the city in January, taking a Greyhound bus from Chicago to Detroit--then a short cab ride to the border crossing at Windsor.

But in less than nine months, and with a loan from his brother in London, Butt had converted a Dunkin' Donuts into his own restaurant on Toronto's Gerrard Street,
where Canadian maple leaf flags fly alongside the green-and-white banner of Pakistan.

On Sept. 26, he opened G. Ali Baba--yet another example of how some of the lifeblood that once coursed through Devon Avenue is now pumping new energy into
cities such as Toronto.

Butt has been reunited with two of his old teammates from his days playing cricket in Washington Park on Chicago's South Side--Shakeel Ahmed and Nadeem
Mukhi, a Chicago cabdriver.

On the second day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, the smell of chicken curry and the traditional rice dish biryani filled the air of Mukhi's Toronto apartment.

For the second year, Nadeem Mukhi and his wife are celebrating Ramadan in Canada. It is a time when they especially feel the ache of separation from family.
Mona Mukhi should be bringing her chicken curry and biryani to her in-laws' home on Chicago's North Side for fast-breaking suppers.

Not this year.

Nadeem Mukhi came to Chicago in 1991 at the age of 22. After meeting and marrying Mona, the couple had two daughters--Haiba, now 4, and Ramila, 18
months. Both are U.S. citizens, born at Swedish Covenant Hospital on the North Side.

Generally, immigrants living in the U.S. for 10 years can apply for permanent residency and obtain a green card if their children are U.S. citizens. Mukhi had assumed
his chances were even better because his two older brothers are naturalized U.S. citizens, and one of them sponsored him. Those sponsored by close relatives who
are citizens have a stronger case for getting permanent residency status.

But 10 years passed and still no green card--to this day, Mukhi doesn't know exactly why. He felt a growing impatience with the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and
feared that the Sept. 11 attacks might eventually lead to his family's deportation.

"I was there 12 years--and nothing. How long you're going to wait for status?" he said. "I was scared. I have a family. If they take me, who's gonna feed them?"

He decided he couldn't wait any longer. After selling their belongings for pennies on the dollar, the Mukhis loaded up for Canada on Sept. 9, 2002.

In Toronto, the government helped the former Chicago cabbie train to become a security guard and got him a job patrolling his family's apartment complex from
midnight to 5 a.m. In just the first several months on the job, Mukhi said, he has gone from making $6.50 to $12 an hour.

Job training, basic medical care and other help: It's a relative wealth of assistance compared to what is available to such families in the U.S.

"They treat you like you are a citizen," Mukhi said. "It's unbelievable."

But Canada's more generous policy already is taking on a tougher edge.

The acceptance rate for refugee claims by Pakistani nationals dropped from 54 percent in 2002 to 39 percent for the first nine months of this year, according to the
Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board.

In the coming months, final rules for the Safe Third Country Agreement between the U.S. and Canada will be published. The agreement is expected to greatly
reduce the ability of families such as the Mukhis to cross the border legally.

"Canada has always been a safety valve for refugees from America," said Chris Owens, head of Vive La Casa, the Buffalo refugee center. "That valve will be shut."