On February 14, 2018, Katrina Jabbi and her husband Buba needed a distraction. Buba had a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the next day.
A few months earlier Buba received notice that ICE had bumped his appointment date up by six months, from June 2018 to December 2017. He had to work on the new date, so he contacted the agency to reschedule. They moved his appointment to February 2018. Since Donald Trump took office, the Jabbis had heard stories of immigrants getting detained during these appointments. Any deviation, even a change in date, felt like cause for concern.
He met Katrina in November of 2009 on a Greyhound bus and it was “love at first sight.” “I’ll never forget when he got off the bus. It was almost like my soulmate was leaving me.” Katrina punctuates the melodrama with a laugh. “I remember looking out the window like I didn’t want to be away from him.” They kept in touch and a few months later, “I packed my bags.” Katrina is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in rural Wisconsin. She has an endearing, nasally midwestern accent that comes out when she says words like bag. “I put my stuff in storage, and I went to drive with him in his truck.”
ICE released Buba from immigration detention after six months. ICE still couldn’t obtain travel documents from Gambia, so the agency let him out, but he wasn’t free. They put him on an order of supervision, the immigration version of parole. He’d need to check in with immigration agents as often as they requested.
The final step requires travel to a native country. Because Gambia refused to issue travel documents to its citizens, Buba couldn’t leave the U.S. “He literally couldn’t participate in that process,” Anderson-Stepanek said.
Before Buba was deported, Katrina took the children to visit him at the jail. “I told my oldest, I was like, You know, daddy is from a different country. And he doesn’t have the right papers.” As she recounted this story a year later, Katrina said this last sentence almost like a question. How could she begin to tell a five-year-old that her father had disappeared because of paperwork? “I had to explain it really simple,” she said. “He’s not a bad person, but they want to take him back to his country.”
