Nearly Blind Refugee Escapes Ethnic Cleansing In Myanmar, Dies In Trump's American Version
MAGA Chuds: We voted for this.
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s campaign to rid America of immigrants claimed yet another life last week, although this time it took a little time for the body to be found.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, had been in jail in Buffalo, New York, for just over a year after city cops tased and beat him February 15, 2025, for the crimes of being nearly blind, lost, confused, and unable to understand whatever the cops were yelling at him.
After Shah Alam’s family finally reached a plea agreement they thought would keep him out of the maw of Trump’s deportation machine, he was released from the Erie County Holding Center after posting bail last Thursday. Not to the care of his family, but instead to Border Patrol agents, who eventually drove him to a closed Tim Horton’s in Buffalo and left him. The DHS goons didn’t bother contacting his family or his attorney, just dumped him miles from his home, unable to speak English or see more than a few feet in front of him. His body was discovered five days later, on Tuesday night, about four miles from the coffee shop, according to Buffalo police.
Mr. Shah Alam survived the Myanmar military government’s genocide against its Rohingya Muslim minority — facilitated by Facebook, never forget — and was granted refuge here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Some refuge! We don’t do that anymore, and the rules changed right under millions of people. And on a social media platform owned by another billionaire fascist, the American dictator’s supporters said nobody named ‘Nurul Amin Shah Alam’ belongs in America in the first place.
True to pattern, DHS lied about essential parts of the story, claiming in a statement that after the Border Patrol agents determined Shah Alam wasn’t subject to deportation because he was a refugee, they decided to be nice and do him a favor:
“Border Patrol agents offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station,” the agency said. “He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance. The U.S. Border Patrol defers to the Buffalo Police Department for further questions.”
Yes, the man whose one good eye could only see, blurrily, about three feet ahead of him was determined not to have any “disabilities requiring special assistance.” Or even a phone call to let his family know he had been released or where he was. Or for that matter, as Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan said Thursday, the agents could have taken him back to the Holding Center where they’d picked him up earlier, where deputies could have called the family.
As for the claim that Border Patrol had taken Shah Alam to a nice warm place, surveillance video released Thursday night showed that he had been left outside a Tim Horton’s that was closed, at night, as temperatures were dropping. For shoes, all he had were the thin orange booties from the jail.
In a separate bit of likely disinformation before the video came out, an unidentified “federal law enforcement official” told CNN that the Border Patrol agents attempted to communicate with Shah Alam using a translator program, that he “asked” to be taken where he ended up being dumped, and even that he “was offered an opportunity to make a phone call but declined, the official said.”
Given Shah Alam’s extremely limited English and the video showing him wandering outside the closed Tim Horton’s, we’re going to go with “lying liars” yet again. If they said, in English, “do you want to make a phone call?” and he didn’t reply, that’s not really him declining.
The lies did the job, though, and rightwingers on social media are unshakably convinced that the Border Patrol simply took Shah Alam where he asked to go, even though they didn’t have to be so generous. As for the video showing he never made it into the coffee shop, MAGA Chuds insist it looked to them like he could walk just fine, so he probably wasn’t even blind, and he didn’t even die until five days later, so how is any of this the Border Patrol’s fault, you stupid libs?
No, really, lots of idiots are insisting he wasn’t blind. I should stay off Twitter.
Shah Alam’s movements between the time he was dumped in the cold and his death Tuesday are still being investigated, but a timeline released by Buffalo police Thursday noted that the 911 caller who reported an “unresponsive male” Tuesday evening added that she had seen him moving earlier, around 5:30. When she saw him again a bit before 8:30, he was no longer moving, seemed not to be breathing, and his hands were gray, so she called 911. It was Shah Alam’s body. He was buried Thursday as local, state, and national elected leaders — Democrats at least — called for a full investigation.
CBP’s actions more or less guaranteed Shah Alam wouldn’t make it home. It’s a tactic derived from the “Starlight Tours” inflicted on Canadian First Nations people in the 1990s and early 2000s, when cops would drop off indigenous men late at night outside city limits and leave them to freeze to death as they tried to walk back to town. The deaths were attributed to their being “drunk.” DHS has used similar tactics in the Twin Cities, although activists have organized efforts to get warm clothes and rides to people moved from detention and dropped off in parking lots miles from their homes.
In Buffalo’s refugee community, there’s also well-justified speculation that Shah Alam’s own starlight tour was the Border Patrol’s fuck-you to Buffalo city government for its refusal to cooperate with ICE. Ba Zan Lin, also a refugee from Burma, said, “Our conviction is that this is done intentionally to show … the Ryan administration that this is what happens when there’s non-collaboration. […] It’s inhumane.”
How Did A Refugee Spend A Year In County Jail?
Nurul Amin Shah Alam only arrived in Buffalo in December 2024, a couple months before the incident that landed him in jail. His public defense attorney, Benjamin Macaluso, told Buffalo news outlet Investigative Post that after being cooped up in cold weather for most of two months, Shah Alam took advantage of what seemed like a nice day in February to go for a walk.
In need of a walking stick, he managed to find his way down the block to a shop that sold curtain rods, where he purchased one. Curtain rod in hand, Shah Alam strolled his Black Rock neighborhood until the weather turned colder, Macaluso said. He attempted to walk home, but, confused, ended up at a stranger’s house instead.
He found himself on a woman’s porch just as she was letting her dog out, Macaluso said.
“He comes from a place where people don’t keep dogs,” Macaluso said. “The dog’s freaking out. He’s freaking out. She calls the police and says there’s an unidentified Black man in my driveway.”
Police arrived and shouted at him, in English, to drop the curtain rod, but he couldn’t understand them or even see them clearly. Here’s body cam video of the encounter, just released by the city Thursday. Shah Alam repeatedly says “Sorry! Sorry” in an attempt to calm the angry blurs shouting unintelligibly at him, but he also doesn’t drop the two halves of the curtain rod, and even waves them around, so the cops used their Tasers and tackled him.
The Washington Post (gift link), which notably went and found a Rohingya speaker to translate, reports:
Shah Alam can be heard speaking in Rohingya and Malay. He asks for God’s help and tries to explain to the uncomprehending officers that he lives nearby and was going to the store. He pleads with the officers not to throw away his phone.
Once he was tased, Shah Alam freaked out and bit the cops, which no, you shouldn’t do; he was charged with a load of felonies and taken to jail, the Erie County Holding Center. Over the course of the last year, Macaluso explained, his family elected not to post bail, fearing that the felony charges would result in ICE deporting him; the agency sent a “detainer” to the county to that effect.
Finally, earlier this month, the Erie County DA’s office agreed to a plea deal in which Shah Alam would plead guilty to misdemeanor charges, which Macaluso said would let him come home and resolve the case “in a way that reduced the likelihood of there being any reason for ICE to detain Mr. Shah Alam.” The attorney even said that ICE agreed, after he paid bail last Thursday, that it would decline to detain him.
There was only one hitch: Nobody, not the jail and not the Border Patrol, informed the family or Macaluso that instead of sending Shah Alam to ICE’s detention center in Batavia, where he was originally supposed to be released Friday, Border Patrol agents instead took him from the jail Thursday afternoon, then decided to dump him after learning that he wasn’t subject to deportation. After all, why bother driving the 45 minutes to Batavia when they could just leave him in the night and be rid of him?
Macaluso said he spent most of Friday in Batavia trying to find his client, who by then was already wandering somewhere in Buffalo with only those jail booties on his feet. He told the Investigative Post he believed Border Patrol held Shah Alam for a time at their office in Tonawanda before taking him to the Tim Horton’s. But neither he nor the family had been notified of any of it. The family put up posters seeking help finding him, and on Sunday, Macaluso filed a missing persons report with the Buffalo Police.
To make things worse, Buffalo Police Detective Richard Hy, who was given the case, closed it for several hours after seeing the ICE detainer, assuming that Shah Alam was obviously in custody by then. The case was only reopened Monday, but then the poor man’s body was found Tuesday evening.
In the meantime, misinformation and disinformation has been flying around the internet, including the DHS insistence that Border Patrol left Shah Alam safe and warm at the diner he asked to be taken to, and a false report from the police department claiming the county medical examiner had “ruled out” exposure or homicide as his cause of death. Thursday, the Erie County Health Department said no such finding had been made, in a statement saying such reports were in error. The county said that “Despite reports that our Medical Examiner’s Office has established a cause and manner of death, we have not provided that information to anyone,” adding that the investigation was still ongoing.
We’ll eventually get to the truth, but by then Crom only knows how many more people Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign will have killed, as its supporters insist that nothing bad is happening at all.
[Investigative Post / MPR / CNN / MSNOW / Investigative Post / Buffalo Police Department timeline / WGRZ / WaPo (gift link)]
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(Updated with a comment from a member of Buffalo's refugee community speculating this was a deliberate fuck-you to Buffalo for not cooperating with ICE on civil detainments, and with a Washington Post translation of what Mr. Shah Alam tried to say before he was tased, beaten, and arrested last year)
I'm just so gutted. This is something happening locally. It's really just hard to contemplate the abject cruelty these unaccountable agents have. Just dumped this helpless man in a parking lot in the frigid cold.
And this is what millions of Americans wanted. They were gleeful for this kind of thing, to remove the minorities...the immigrants they don't like. It's just a country chock full of millions of detestable people who cheer this on.
My community is shocked, horrified and folks here are mobilizing to try and get some sort of accountability.