by Aran Myracle
On August 21st, 2025, Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry reported to the Department of Homeland Security office in Tukwila, Washington for his naturalization hearing. His wife, Melissa, was not permitted to enter the office with him, so she waited outside. 3 hours later ICE agents finally informed her that her husband had been removed to immigration detention hours before.
It was a hot day, and I was working outside because we’d had a leak in the office that closed our building for programming. The message came across the group signal chat: ICE detained Zahid. I couldn’t leave work on a Thursday evening, our busiest night of the week, and even if I could, there was nothing to be done in that moment. ICE had him.
The cage Zahid was placed in was less than 2 miles from where I work in downtown Tacoma, out on the tideflats amongst warehouses, on an EPA superfund site. 1500 human beings are caged there by GEO Group, a private security corporation, in violation of Washington state law. Our neighbors, friends, and family were kept in cages and subjected to mental and physical torture.
Zahid is my comrade in the veterans’ anti-war movement. He is a 100% disabled US Army veteran. He is the president of the Rachel Corrie chapter of Veterans for Peace in Olympia. He was a longtime supporter of the GI Rights Coffeehouse I interned at in undergrad— that’s where we first met in 2014. We were not about to let ICE kidnap our comrade quietly.
The South Sound Crew of About Face Veterans Against the War started visiting Zahid in the concentration camp weekly. And organizing. We spoke at rallies. We protested in Tukwila and in front of the detention center. We organized workshops and teach-ins. We contacted the media. We told everyone we could about Zahid’s plight. We made Melissa the keynote speaker at our Armistice Day rally. We wrote character statements, attended court hearings, and raised funds. We fought, knowing every step of the way that if it were one of us, Zahid would be doing the same.
We visited Zahid through glass over a telephone, watching as his eyesight grew worse due to the medical violence of GEO Group. The faces of his two young children, Adil and Salma (Arabic for Justice and Peace), grew harder for him to make out as the weeks dragged on in detention. He couldn’t hold them, or touch them, and they didn’t understand why their Baba couldn’t come home to them.
Then, in December came a break. After months of fighting, the habeas petition for Zahid’s release would be heard in federal court. Melissa asked me to arrange a press conference immediately following the hearing. It was the 8th and final day of Chanukah and I struggled not to get my hopes up. Hope, I found myself saying over and over, is a dangerous thing. I didn’t dare believe that Zahid could be released. I didn’t want to be destroyed if he wasn’t. Instead, I focused on the press conference. I obtained a PA system. I collected the large poster board pictures of Zahid I’d had made for Armistice Day. I arrived at court early with my comrades and we set up for the press conference while friends and
collaborators went into court. Veterans, Quakers, activists, politicians, neighbors, friends, and press went in while we stayed with the equipment, trying to contain the anxiety of waiting for the judge’s ruling, knowing it was possible that there would be no ruling forthcoming. The judge could easily decide to kick the can down the road and wait until after the holidays to make a decision.
We didn’t have to wait long. After 20 minutes or so, people began filing back out of the courthouse. It was immediately apparent that the judge had ruled in Zahid’s favor. People were jubilant. Melissa emerged from court with her fist raised. The judge had ordered Zahid’s immediate release from ICE custody, and the attorney for Pam Bondi apologized to Zahid for his unlawful detention.
The press conference was a success, and we wrapped up in time for me to head to work. I spent the remainder of the day numb, unable to process that Zahid had
been released. News media published their articles, and I watched a video of Zahid leaving the gates of the Northwest Detention Center at my desk at work, not far from where I’d read the first message that ICE had detained Zahid 5 months prior.
As leftist organizers, you quickly learn that you don’t win most fights. Victories are rare in the long struggle for Justice. Often, you don’t live to see the fruits of your battles. But we got to see Zahid freed from NWDC in 2025. Seeing him reunited with Adiland Salma is my greatest coup as an organizer. I pray in 2026 we see him naturalized and able to remain in the US, the country he was wounded serving, for good.
