Deportation Order.

• Author: Jarrar, Randa
• Position: Essay

Just after New Year's of 2005, my younger brother, Raed, then a senior at the University of Maryland, came home to D.C. after visiting our parents in Kuwait. The security people at Dulles Airport detained and questioned him for hours, then told him he was a deportable alien. He had two weeks to surrender to authorities. Once he did, he was sent to a jail in Virginia.

A few days after his imprisonment, I got an e-mail from his lawyer that he needed contact lens solution. I rushed out and bought it, sent it off with his prisoner ID number on the envelope, went home, and spent the rest of the day in bed.

Unlike my brother, I was born in the U.S., and never had to work for my little blue passport. My Egyptian/Jordanian family did; they all took tests and held little flags and swore to do or not do things--all but my brother, who was too flaky at eighteen to fill out the proper forms or take buses to the right offices. He was left behind in our family's Becoming American journey. In 2001, he was living with students who sold pot. When they got busted, he went to jail for five days, and did a few dozen hours of community service. And he was being deported four years later because that had been "a crime of moral turpitude."

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My brother called me collect, and I got up the courage to ask him what the jail in Virginia looked like.

They let us congregate for religious reasons inside a small strip. They seal it off with yellow tape. You can pray or talk inside the yellow line.

A few days later, my father called me in a panic.

"Your brother is turning into a fundie," he said.

Don't be ridiculous.

He told morn he is writing a sermon for this Friday's prayers.

I pictured my brother reading a sermon in the small space, his hand resting on the yellow tape on the floor.

"That's so sweet," I said.

It is not sweet; it is crazy. Please stop him. He will come out of that jail a fanatic!

"That'll never happen," I said. "Don't you know him at all? He is just finding a way to cope." I couldn't tell my father that my brother liked liquor and women too much to become religious.

I n order to get the government to reverse the deportation, we hired a psychologist to determine the level of hardship my brother's absence would cause us. By the time the therapist called me, the lawyer had written me an e-mail saying I was the only sane person in my family.

His final court date was March 22. I met my parents in a hotel in the same building as...