YOUNGSTOWN — Local business owner Amer Othman — known locally as Al Adi — said he is prepared to leave the town where he has lived since the 1980s, but said he won’t stop fighting to return.

Adi is being deported to Amman, Jordan, Sunday and will leave behind his four daughters and his businesses. A resident of the U.S. for 38 years, Adi, 57, has lived in Youngstown since the 1980s, where he opened Downtown Circle, a store often credited with igniting the re-emergence of business in the city’s downtown.

“I am with protecting borders. I am with laws,” Adi said. “The laws and immigration should be for the interest and benefit of the people. It should protect our country, and I say our country because I consider myself American, it shouldn’t be to damage families and destroy dreams.”

“Of course, we will continue to fight. It is an injustice,” prominent immigration lawyer and Adi’s attorney, David Leopold, said. “I’ve seen a lot of different cases where people get shafted by determinations made by the Department of Homeland Security and this is one of the worst that I’ve seen.”

Adi has been living under the threat of deportation for more than 20 years. After coming to the U.S. on a visa, Adi married an American citizen and received a Green Card. Ten years later, Othman was divorced and living in Youngstown, where he met his second and current wife, Fidaa Musleh, an American citizen, and the two decided to move to Brazil for three years.

The first sign of trouble came when he returned to America, and his Green Card was confiscated for being out of the country for too long. When he attempted to get a new Green Card sponsored by Musleh, Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied him, claiming his first marriage was a “sham.” It was this initial ruling Adi has been fighting to overturn through the immigration courts and appeals courts.

ICE based this initial denial on an affidavit signed by his ex-wife in 1990 declaring their marriage was just so Adi could obtain a Green Card. In 2007, his ex-wife filed another affidavit denying the legitimacy of the first and claiming it was signed under duress when ICE agents showed up at her house at 7:30 a.m. with a document she didn’t fully understand.

“This is a good guy. He has worked really hard. His ex-wife, which they claimed was a fraudulent marriage, she still carries his name to this day,” Leopold said.

Adi said the second affidavit was easily ignored by courts and ICE officials.

“The government here is the judge, jury and executioner. He has never been before a judge on whether or not his original marriage was a good faith marriage or a sham. The government concluded this on its own, in private. They never asked him a damn question. He virtually begged them to bring in his ex-wife to talk to them, and we would have paid for it, and they wouldn’t do it. Why?” Leopold said. “It is like if the Department of Motor and Vehicles decided to take away your license … without giving you the right to contest it. It flies in the face of due process. The problem is the government has that kind of power here.”

Though Adi faced threats of deportation over the years, he was able to fend them off with help. In 2013, U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, D-Howland, prevented an attempt to deport Adi with a “private bill,” a measure used in the U.S. House of Representatives to stay deportation based on a longstanding agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. By redrafting this bill every year, Ryan was able to prevent attempts to deport Adi indefinitely.

When Donald Trump was elected president, however, Adi knew circumstances had changed. Under the Trump administration’s harsher immigration policy, Ryan’s “private bill” was no longer honored, and in September 2016, ICE moved to deport Adi.

“The turnaround in the case is when Trump took a decision saying that even if you are under a Private Bill, you cannot be protected from deportation. You are talking about 800,000 cases that are like my case. You are talking about, when you include their families, millions of people affected,” Adi said. “I met a guy in the immigration office who came to the country when he was six months old. His family didn’t do his paperwork. Now he is 40. He is being deported. What justice is that?”

With his rights limited because of his immigration status, Adi has little legal recourse to overturn his deportation. His main hope lies with the legislature’s powers to overturn his deportation, and he said he has received bi-partisan political support from Ryan and now U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Tracey Winbush, the vice chair of the Mahoning County GOP.

“We are still working behind the scenes [to help Adi],” said Michael Zetts, communications director for Ryan.

Realizing the political winds will change, Adi said this support could bring him home.

Leopold agreed, saying there is precedent for deportees being allowed to return.

“The climate right now is very bad. The one objective fact here is Mr. Adi is not white. He is from the Middle East, and who is this administration focused on?” Leopold said. “This pendulum will swing back the other way. One day Trump is going to be gone. … My view is at some point they are going to have to fix this immigration system, and we are going to need something in that law to reunite American families, families that were split up for no reason other than to satisfy Donald Trump’s thirst for terrorizing immigrants. And that is the only explanation for this. This doesn’t help Youngstown. It doesn’t help the people of Youngstown, the people who are employed by Mr. Adi. It doesn’t help the economy.”

lbouquet@tribtoday.com