This Arlington resident has never been to Israel. Why is ICE deporting her there? | Opinion
Ward Sakeik might be the first Palestinian whose life was spared by an Israeli rocket.
On June 12, hours before the Israeli Air Force dropped hundreds of munitions across Iran, Sakeik waited on the Fort Worth Alliance Airport tarmac, cuffed at her wrists and legs, wondering if her next plane would send her to the country that made her a refugee — a country she’s never seen.
Sakeik said that when she asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents about her destination, an agent replied: “You’re going to the Israeli border.” Sakeik was confused. “I’ve never even stepped foot in Palestine,” she said. “Why am I going to the Israeli border?”
She said that she asked to call her husband, whom she had not spoken to in 60 hours, ICE agents declined, she said, and told her that “we don’t want legal counsel or teams involved [because] they’re going to start raising questions, and they’re going to know you’re being deported.”
Then, a sudden reversal. While Sakeik, 22, witnessed groups of Kenyan and Russian migrants board the aircraft, she was told she and other Arab detainees, apparently on their way to Israel, would instead return to an ICE detention center in Alvarado. Sakeik said that an agent told her that she and the other Arabs were still deported, technically, but because Israel closed its airspace, the Department of Homeland Security would reschedule her flight.
ICE did not respond to the Star-Telegram’s request for comment on Sakeik’s allegations in time for publication.
Because of her limbo, Sakeik can’t stay in the United States, where she and her husband own a house in Arlington. But because she is stateless, she can’t be sent “home.” Legally speaking, she has none.
Collecting precise data on stateless populations is difficult, but in 2020, the Center for Migration Studies estimated that 218,000 people in the United States are, like Sakeik, are potentially stateless, or at risk of statelessness, with 15,200 of those people residing in Texas.
“[Stateless] people can go decades without having basic support, like identification,” said Sophia Gurulé, a senior immigration staff attorney with the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, a first-of-its-kind public defender program in the United States for detained people facing deportation.
Sakeik knows this well. Though her family’s lineage traces back to Gaza, she was born a refugee in Saudi Arabia and arrived in the United States on a visa when she was 8 years old. When Sakeik’s asylum application was rejected, her family then requested relocation from six different embassies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel. Each country denied their entry.
Without a place to send Sakeik’s family, ICE issued an order of supervision, a legal mechanism that allows them to legally stay and work in the country as long as they submit to regular check-ins and abstain from criminal activity.As a result, Sakeik’s upbringing was arguably more Texan than Gazan. Sakeik grew up in Dallas and graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, where graduated magna cum laude. Texas is where she met her husband, Taahir Shaikh, a 28-year-old US citizen, who relayed her account to me. Texas is where she operated what was, according to Shaikh, a successful photography business. And Texas is where she and Shaikh intended to return to once the newlyweds finished honeymooning in the U.S. Virgin Islands, an intentional destination that ensured their vacation was on American soil and in compliance with the law.
Before their honeymoon, Sakeik applied for a green card application, a momentous step towards leaving her stateless limbo and establishing permanent residence in what she still wants to be her forever home. But since the newlyweds touched down in Miami on their way back, Shaikh said his wife has since spent the first four months of her marriage in ICE detention, with sometimes sporadic communication with him, her attorney, or the outside world.
Shaikh is trying to draw attention to his wife’s distinct but not entirely uncommon situation. Last week, he started a Change.org petition urging Dallas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett to denounce the detention of a woman who lived in her district. While the congresswoman stopped well short of demanding Sakeik’s release, Crockett acknowledged the situation in a statement to the Dallas Observer: “We have been in direct contact with her family and continue to engage with the appropriate federal agencies as we work toward a just and humane resolution.”
Unfortunately for Sakeik, the DHS has been particularly hostile towards cases like Sakeik’s under the Trump administrations.
“Whether a person is stateless is an irrelevant factor for this current administration. The goal is to facilitate deportation of racialized people to the global south,” said Gurulé, adding that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security “is pursuing deportations at an unprecedented rate and with a particular animus for Palestinians.”
For now Shaikh campaigns tirelessly for her release, while Sakeik lingers in her jail cell. Both remain perplexed — why them?
“There have been times while we’re talking on the phone and [my wife] is saying to me, ‘Babe, I consider this country more my home than the country of birth or country of nationality, because this is the country that gave me every dream and life event that I would want,’ ” Shaikh said. “ ‘Why are they doing this to me right now?’ ”
This story was originally published June 20, 2025 at 5:25 AM with the headline "This Arlington resident has never been to Israel. Why is ICE deporting her there? | Opinion."
