Yaser Alamoodi, who served as Arizona State University student government president in 2005, rides his bike on campus in a 2003 file photo.Posted on 07/21/2007 5:22:43 AM PDT by radar101
Yaser Alamoodi, who served as Arizona State University student government president in 2005, rides his bike on campus in a 2003 file photo.
Brad Armstrong, Tribune
A former Arizona State University student government president has lost his fight to stay in the United States and will be deported.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said federal officials will now move forward with procedures to repatriate Yaser Alamoodi to his native Saudi Arabia, pending Saudi consent.
If federal agents are unable to send Alamoodi to Saudi Arabia, then Kice said Yemen would be an alternate destination. An immigration judge ordered the deportation on July 2 following more than 10 months of legal battles for Alamoodi, who served as ASU’s undergraduate student government president from fall 2005 until his resignation in January 2006.
Kice said Alamoodi, 30, has been barred from returning to the United States for five years.
He was arrested by federal agents in September 2006 after his wife, Joy Hepp, filed for divorce and revoked her sponsorship of his citizenship application.
Alamoodi has been detained at an Eloy prison since then.
He expressed disappointment in the ruling in an e-mail sent Wednesday to friends and supporters.
“This marks the end of my legal struggle to be released back into the US,” he writes. “It was filled with many surprises, endless delays, a long appeal process and a painful ending.”
Alamoodi blasts the recent failure of Congress to pass an immigration reform bill, which he calls his “only means to get out of this jail.”
He writes that his long legal battle caused him to lose his “ideological innocence.”
“In a way, I was sold on the American Dream that people here bring about to folks from other countries,” he writes. “I really did. Somewhere in my case, this rosy dream turned into a horrible nightmare.”
Alamoodi vows in the e-mail to create a bilingual Internet blog covering the “holy trinity of cultural taboos,” which he identified as politics, religion and sex.
“You just cannot go from an experience like mine and be content without sharing some of the newly acquired insights with others,” he writes.
Alamoodi gained national attention during his presidency when he spoke against ASU coeds posing nude for Playboy. Alamoodi urged the university to use its code of conduct to block future photo shoots after ASU women were featured in the magazine’s “Girls of the Pac-10” issue in October 2005.
Alamoodi also temporarily lost his salary when he failed to appoint student government Supreme Court justices. He said his resignation during the first week of the spring 2006 semester was due to financial concerns and not related to any controversy.
Wednesday’s e-mail does not address any specific events during his term in office but does include a blanket apology.
“A farewell message would be incomplete without a heart-felt apology for my behavior that you deemed disappointing by any stretch of the word,” he writes.
Can someone explain how his wife filing for divorce revoked his immigration status?
don’t let the door knob hit ya where the good lord split ya, yaser.
she was his sponsor.
no more.
This probably is part of the reasons liberals haven't really helped him.
Funny thing is the ex wife wrote at least one sappy article about illegal aliens
http://cronkitezine.asu.edu/fall2004/immigration.html
There’s a photo of her at the URL too.
“ideological innocence.”
Dude, you’re 30. Try changing your own hellhole of a country instead of running to ours. The world would be a much better place.
If you're married to a US citizen you're basically assured of being able to get a Green Card and,eventually,citizenship if you can pass a background check and convince the INS that your marriage is "real".But it doesn't occur automatically or "overnight',as I believe it once did.
I assume that the divorce occurred before the point of no return and,as a result,he got the boot.
Legal immigrants have special hurdles not applicable to undocumented "tourists" (formerly knwon as "illegal aliens").
One of the hurdles is they played by the rules and are well-known to the immigration folks. Something like this happens massive efforts are made and enormous resources are expended by Chertoff and others to catch and deport them.
It's a two track system.
With the amount of time and money spent nailing this guy they could have built 20 miles of fence with Mexico.
VIDEO Removed — more censorship from YouTube.
He sounds like a typical left wing control freak that the country is better off without.
Wait a sec..at age 28 0r 29, he was president of the UNDERGRADUATE student body?
Unfortunately, this article does not make clear whether the jailbird is a member of the Al-Amoudi clan, one of whom was the founder of the American Muslim Foundation and the Fiqh Council of North America. The Al-Amoudi have been associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the USA, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Ethiopia.
You get a SALARY as STUDENT body president??
Above is the nitwit babe, Joy Hepp, who married him. My guess is she had second thoughts about becoming a Muslim baby factory. Nitwit babe was researching her Mexican roots
It is very very very rare that a Muslim marries an infidel without her converting to Muhammad's cult
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
Her filing for divorce was not the trigger. The trigger was her revoking her sponsorship of his citizenship application. A lot of people do not realize that just having a green card does not guarantee a person will be able to renew that green card. A lot of companies what “import” workers, demand weekly kickbacks from their employees under threat of revoking sponsorship. Next time you purchase a cup of coffee at a major New England based coffee and donut emporium, look at all the workers there speaking Portugese, Spanish and Chinese. Count them up, multiply by 4.2 (to take into account the other shifts) and then multiply that number by $200, the amount those individual are required to “kick back” to the franchise owner)...and do you suspect the franchise owner is declaring that money his income taxes?
Saudi arabians?
We don’t need no stinking Saudi arabians.
This is one of the really annoying aspects of the immigration problem: the ability of a non-government US citizens to revoke the right to stay in the US of a non-citizen.
Sponsorship has been horribly abused. In this case, his wife decides to divorce him, and gets to screw him over by revoking his authorization to stay in the US.
Most of the time, however, it is done by employer sponsors, when an employee they have brought into the US starts behaving in an “uppity” manner, like demanding to keep all of their pay, instead of kicking half of it back to their employer. So the employer makes a call to the INS, or ICE, and gets the ungrateful servant kicked out of the country.
A simple solution would be to have a few bureaucrats to review canceled sponsorships, and at least offer a legal visitor the chance to get an *alternative* sponsor.
Sponsorship of a foreign alien isn’t terribly hard to do, and in this guy’s case, he could have probably found somebody who would agree that he could continue to reside in the US as a sponsored alien.
But he was not given that chance. You ex-wife hates you, so you have to leave the country. That sucks.
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