I'm Alex Chadwick. A Nigerian immigrant here facing deportation says he's going to be tortured and killed if he is, in fact, sent back home. Frank Enwonwu was caught smuggling heroin 22 years ago. Since then he's lived the dangerous life of an informant for federal drug authorities.
COHEN: He claims part of the deal was a promise from the feds to allow him to stay in the U.S. and escape revenge from the Nigerian drug dealers he earlier ratted out. NPR's Tovia Smith reports.
TOVIA SMITH: Frank Enwonwu is the first to tell you he made a bad mistake. In 1986, he says he was tricked by a Nigerian military officer into smuggling five ounces of heroin into the U.S. When U.S. drug authorities offered him a deal, Enwonwu says he leapt at the chance.
Mr. FRANK ENWONWU: It was like a miracle for me because this DEA officer, in stead of taking me to jail to prosecute me, offers me an opportunity to redeem myself.
SMITH: Enwonwu worked as an informant for about a year, helping authorities nab higher-ups in the drug world and building a new life in America, driving taxis in Boston and studying nursing. But a decade later, after Congress passed a retroactive law making immigrants deportable for drug crimes, Enwonwu was suddenly arrested and detained. He spent the next 11 years fighting a deportation order that he says amounts to a death sentence.
Mr. ENWONWU: If I get into Nigeria today, I have at least 50 other people looking for me. I will get killed in there. You cannot play with my life as human. That's not the deal we made the first day. They promised me protection. I trusted them. But they used me and threw me away like trash.
SMITH: Enwonwu took his case to an Immigration Agency judge and won, but then lost to a panel of appeals judges who didn't believe that Enwonwu was facing torture back home.
Professor STEPHEN H. LEGOMSKY (Washington University): I have to say in all candor this it's difficult for me to see how they could reach that conclusion.
SMITH: Professor Stephen Legomsky is an immigration law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
Prof. LEGOMSKY: I think it was probably part political, in the ideological sense, and partly just sloppiness...
| • | Drug Informant Fights Deportation
SHOW: Day To Day 4:00 PM EST NPR Day to Day, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008 Byline: Alex Cohen and Alex Chadwick, hosts |
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