There are many Pakistanis in the US who have been charged with crime they never committed
ONCE he was suicidal. Now, he’s gone into deep depression. The unbearable lightness of calamity to come is driving Hafeez, a Pakistani store owner, father of three little girls, close to the edge; he can blunder further into an emotional whirlpool and allow the forces of injustice to suck him under for good, or he can put up a spirited fight and get justice done to see a new dawn of freedom.
For one small mistake — his wife Ayesha, a white American who converted to Islam, swears her husband made unwittingly — Hafeez can end up paying a big price: 30 years in jail or exiting America forever, if convicted.
The case is in the court and the ruling can come as early as March 28.
It is a tale of treachery, error and human tragedy ... a tear-jerker of sorts.
Khan Abdul Hafeez, 36, a Green Card holder that makes him a legal permanent resident in America, albeit ‘alien’ in the lexicon of US immigration authorities, relocated to Texas, along with his wife Ayesha and three children, to start a new chapter in his life back in 1999.
Texas has a labyrinth of Pakistani community, some thriving, some living by their wits and some keeping one step ahead of the law.
Picking up the wrong guys, Hafeez walked into a trap and bought a convenience store from a Pakistani calling himself Toni who had an impressive business card detailing the nature of his trade: “C-store/Gas Station buying/Selling, Consultants For Ground up Project, Most cases 99 per cent Finance Available.”
Toni was asking for $880,000 for the store. Popping out of his hat was the banker, another Pakistani, an employee of Bank United, a subsidiary of Washington Mutual, who provided the cash to Hafeez as a loan under the SBA or Small Business Association.
The one window operation — made up of the unctuous seller and his shady partner, the banker — appeared an ideal fit for Hafeez, shopping around for a business and a loan. It sounded too good to be true, he thought.
Indeed. The duo rushed him through the paperwork, filling in the information and checking the boxes for the loan on behalf of Hafeez. All he did as an eager buyer was to initial each page and put his signature at the end of the loan application, never bothering with the fine print. Out of the blue, one day, Hafeez was told he had committed a bank fraud. He had signed on the Small Business Association (SBA) loan application that tick-marked him as a US citizen (USC). This is a criminal offence.
“All the paperwork was filled out by the banker and not Hafeez. He never gave the banker any false information ... Hafeez’s only fault was not reading or noticing the paperwork closely enough, assuming everything was filled out properly and everything was ligit (legitimate),” says an utterly devastated Ayesha.
“We had just moved here from New York and did not know the seller or the banker at all — I can swear upon my own life and my girls. My husband has a clean heart and is not capable of this sort of thing.”
It was only when Hafeez applied for American citizenship did this ‘fraud’ show up in the background criminal check that is routinely run on every USC applicant.
All hell was let loose on the Hafeez household as the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him last August for: “Lying about his citizenship on his application for a Small Business Administration (SBA) guaranteed loan ... ICE protects the integrity and security of the US economy by targeting and eliminating systematic vulnerabilities in the financial and trade sectors.”
“The SBA loan programme,” says the ICE website “is one of the systems that can be exploited ... the loans secured through the Small Business Administration are intended to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and promote the nation’s economy.”
It displays the names of the eight people (six of them Pakistanis, Hafeez included) who “allegedly secured through fraud” SBA loans that “totalled more than $5.5 million”.
Ayesha paid the bail for her husband and persuaded him not to plead guilty. “He has not robbed a bank or stolen anyone’s money,” says the defiant wife, adding, “our instalments for the loan have never been late, even now that such malevolent times have hit us. We have paid $475,000 to the bank as interest alone on $880,000 loan that we took”.
The rest of the five Pakistanis pleaded guilty and have since been deported back to Pakistan. But Hafeez is holding his ground and his attorney has filed for “selective persecution”, which means that the ICE has only singled out Pakistanis. Ayesha calls it a “witch hunt”.
The ICE is the “largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” and is responsible for “identifying and shutting down vulnerabilities in the nation’s border, economic, transportation and infrastructure security”.
But according to Ayesha Adriana Hafeez: “The US government is trying to incriminate my husband as part of a larger scam involving Pakistanis in Texas ... in their eyes all Pakistanis are crooks.”
Even her paediatrician told her that he bought his building through the SBA: “He said nobody reads all those pages ... of course he’s American and doesn’t have to face such a harsh sentence that immigrants are handed down, were he to make the same mistake.”
Leaving Hafeez to face the music for a wrong that the banker and seller committed (by declaring Hafeez an American citizen on the form without telling him and getting him to sign), the two are now trying to save their own necks. “ICE is trying to convict Hafeez, using the seller as a witness,” says Ayesha.
It’s no coincidence that the five convicted and since deported Pakistanis were given the loan by the same bank — Bank United — whose banker got Hafeez into trouble.
According to the Dallas Business Journal, Bank United, acquired by Washington Mutual (WAMU) “has ceased operations as a US Small Business Administration (SBA) lender of loans nationwide. The banker’s decision was triggered by lawsuits against the WAMU and an ongoing investigation by the SBA of land flips and inflated SBA loans involved in the sale of an estimated 100 convenience stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and in Houston.”
Networks of Pakistani business people reported the Journal in 2003, could have “bilked” SBA out of “upward of $100 million between 1998 and 2000 in deals involving convenience stores, gas stations, hotels and other properties across Texas.”
“For the banker and the seller, the scofflaws, now to stand witness against Hafeez is so ironical,” says Ayesha, “so unjust” and on these grounds alone “the case should fall through the cracks.”
But come March, will it?
Ayesha is praying to Allah to show the right way to those adjudicating the case.
In hindsight, Ayesha’s personal advice to all Muslims is: “Never take out a loan before you are a citizen. Second, even if you’re a citizen, don’t ever assume the bank officials or sellers to be professional and honest people. They make their money regardless, never trust them and sign on papers unless you vet them properly. You might be just signing your whole life away, and putting your whole family into ruins.”
Each passing day brings the Hafeez family closer to its fate being sealed. “My husband knows that I can’t live in the US as I have no way to support myself or my children, nor do I want to be separated from him ... I don’t want my girls to be left fatherless. He’s putting his life at risk by going to jail for an honest mistake.”
Ayesha’s voice is unfaltering as she tells me: “I am fighting to save his life — we both are scared to death of what can happen. I feel I have no choice but to appeal for justice and beg for mercy for an innocent mistake my husband made. “Our girls are his life, they are all he works for ...” But the unkindest cut dealt to the family is from the Pakistani community in Texas, telling them, “please don’t visit our homes, we don’t want the FBI coming after us next!”
There are many Pakistanis in the US who have been charged with crime they never committed
