Sheikh Zubair Bouchiki held without bond in Houston for months

Leenah Salem’s husband called her at work to break the bad news. He said the rumors were true. The spiritual leader of their southeast Houston mosque had been detained by immigration authorities and could face deportation.
“It was just devastating,” Salem said. “I broke down and cried.”
Sheikh Zoubir Bouchikhi, a native of Algeria, was arrested at his home shortly after leading morning prayers at the Abu Bakr Siddqui mosque Dec. 17 and has been held without bond at a detention center in north Houston ever since.
The popular imam’s detention has angered Houston-area Muslims, who are rallying to support Bouchikhi with letter-writing campaigns, petitions and Web sites.
Salem started a group dedicated to his plight on the social-networking site Facebook that boasts more than 700 members. She prays every day for his release.
“I can’t move on,” the 23-year-old receptionist said. “If you go to our mosque, it’s just dead. He added life to our community. I honestly don’t know what I will do if he can’t come back.”
Officials with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to comment on Bouchikhi’s case. But his attorney, Brian Bates, believes the imam is caught up in a backlash by USCIS, which recently tightened visa regulations for religious workers because past abuses allowed in many immigrants who didn’t really work for religious organizations.

Applied for Green Card

Bouchikhi has lived in the U.S. for 11 years and has three American-born children. He first came to this country in January 1998 on a student visa to study at the School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Va., where he earned a master’s degree. In 1999, Bouchikhi moved to Houston. He applied for a religious worker visa, and was hired by the Islamic Society of Greater Houston in 2001. ISGH is a coalition of mosques and schools that includes Abu Bakr Siddqui .
In June 2003, ISGH filed a petition on Bouchikhi’s behalf for permanent residency status as a religious minister, said Candace Cowan, an attorney for ISGH.
The petition was accepted, and Bouchikhi applied for permanent residency for himself, his wife and the couple’s oldest child, a boy who had moved to America as a baby. “We were waiting every day, looking for the Green Card in the mailbox,” said Bouchikhi’s wife, Mounira Belhacel.
In 2007, the family received a notice that USCIS revoked ISGH’s petition and denied Bouchikhi’s request for permanent residency.
According to Cowan, the government said ISGH had failed to prove Bouchikhi had been continuously employed for the two years prior to filing of its petition and had not demonstrated its ability to pay Bouchikhi’s salary.
The government also questioned why ISGH had not proved Bouchikhi was an imam by submitting a formal certificate of ordination. Such a document does not exist in the Muslim faith, which awards positions to clergy by education, experience and community consensus. ISGH and Bouchikhi appealed, but the appeal was rejected in November 2008. The imam was arrested a month later.
Belhacel, who’s Algerian, said her husband was led away in handcuffs as his children wept and screamed.
“I said, ‘He’s not a criminal, let his kids hug him,’ but they would not,” she said. “It was horrifying.”
She visits her husband every week in the detention center, where he continues to lead Friday prayers for Muslim detainees. He misses the children, but she hesitates to bring them with her, especially the youngest, 18-month-old Shareefa.
“You cannot touch through the glass,” Belhacel said. “She will not understand why, and I don’t want her to have that picture in her memory.”

Known as a moderate

Bates said he will contest Bouchikhi’s deportation at anApril 13 hearing. In the meantime, he said the government has given him no clear reason why the imam cannot be released on bail.
“Since he is a spiritual leader for thousands of people, it’s not like he’s going to disappear,” Bates said. “He has absolutely no criminal background, they’ve never suggested that he’s any kind of a threat, so it’s kind of like why is the government paying to feed this man? I mean, it’s absurd.”
Bouchikhi’s detention plays on the fears of some Muslim-Americans that the U.S. government is anti-Muslim, said Ali Khalili, a founding member of the Coalition to Free Imam Bouchikhi. The situation seems even more inexplicable because the imam has a reputation as a strong voice of moderation, Khalili said.
“That’s why an incident like this is so sad,” he said. “It reinforces some of those suspicions and we don’t need that. We need to bridge the gap of misunderstanding.”
Mohamed Kandil, a 25-year-old engineer from League City, said Bouchikhi encouraged Muslim youth to take an active role in society, whether that meant volunteering in homeless shelters or traveling to Galveston to help clean up after Hurricane Ike.
"I can confidently say that if he were to leave Houston it would not only be a loss to the Muslim community it would be a loss to the Houston community as well,'' Kandil said.
Staff writer James Pinkerton contributed to this report.