CHICAGO (The Thursday Times) — A 61-year-old Pakistani father who had lived in the Chicago suburbs for nearly three decades died within a day of being deported to Pakistan on an ICE-chartered flight, and his family says he was visibly ill on the plane but got no medical help.
Ayaz Ahmed was arrested by federal immigration agents in Morton Grove, Illinois, on June 3 for overstaying a visitor’s visa, and was held at the Clay County Justice Center in Indiana. His children say he had no criminal record and had run several businesses in the Chicago area since the family moved from Pakistan in 1997.
Rather than fight his removal, the family tried to speed it up, even offering to pay for his plane ticket. They sent ICE, the jail and Pakistan’s consulate in Chicago a letter from his doctor listing his “multiple chronic medical conditions”, including type 2 diabetes, and the medicines he needed every day. County officials have confirmed he was kept in “medical isolation”.
“All he would say is, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep,’” said his daughter, Saleha Sahar. “He lived and breathed for his kids.”
A 38-hour deportation flight
In late July, Ahmed called his son, Jawwad Mehmood, to say he was being put on a plane. “I just want to say I love you all very much. May God protect you,” Mehmood recalled him saying. “Those were his last words.”
Flight-tracking data show the ICE-chartered GlobalX flight left Fort Worth, Texas, on the morning of July 29 and stopped in Maine, Iceland, Bulgaria and Georgia before landing at a Pakistan Air Force base on the night of July 30, about 38 hours later.
Two men deported on the same flight have told the family that Ahmed’s health was failing during the journey, that he had lost control of his bladder by the Iceland stop, and that he collapsed when the deportees were lined up after landing. “He was in such a bad condition, he just couldn’t talk,” one said.
For eight days the family heard nothing. Ahmed vanished from ICE’s online detainee locator. On August 3, relatives in Pakistan called his children to tell them he was dead.
ICE says claims of neglect are false
ICE says any claims of neglect or mistreatment while Ahmed was in its care are “categorically false”. “No medical emergencies occurred during the flight, no signs of medical distress were observed, and no individuals required hospitalization,” the agency said, adding that he received all his scheduled medication on board and that it had no insight into his death once he had been handed to Pakistani authorities.
A post-mortem report from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad, which the family has shared, records that Ahmed was brought in dead on the morning of July 31, about 14 hours after the flight landed. Doctors found no sign of torture, assault or strangulation. He was buried in Karachi, the city of his birth, and the family says the Federal Investigation Agency paid for the burial.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE, said the pressure to keep up the pace of removals under President Donald Trump forces decisions that would not otherwise be made. “If ICE wasn’t under this political pressure, and someone was having a medical crisis on a flight like this, the flight would have turned back to make sure the individual got the medical care he needed,” he said.
The family’s lawyer, Hashim Siddique, has questioned whether ICE actually had Ahmed’s medicine with it between the detention centre, the airport and the plane, or gave him any medical aid when his health collapsed.
“My father gave a sacrifice for an American dream,” his son said. “He did not deserve to die just because he didn’t have a green card.”
