US immigration authorities arrest chemistry professor after he finishes getting his children ready for school

Amy B Wang 

Recently Syed Ahmed Jamal was getting ready to take his daughter to school when he was stopped outside his home in Lawrence, Kansas.

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were on his front garden. Before Jamal, 55, could say goodbye to his wife and three children, the ICE agents detained him and led him away in handcuffs.

The arrest of a “beloved Lawrence family man, scientist and community leader” came as a shock to Jamal’s friends and neighbours in the Kansas City area, where he has lived since arriving in the United States on a student visa from Bangladeshmore than 30 years ago. He would go on to also attain graduate degrees in molecular biosciences and pharmaceutical engineering, then settle in Lawrence to raise a family.

Along the way, he switched from student visas to an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers, then back to a student visa when he enrolled in a doctoral programme, his family said. At the time of his arrest, Jamal was on a temporary work permit, teaching chemistry as an adjunct professor at Park University in Kansas City and conducting research at various local hospitals.

In a statement to The Washington Post, an ICE official said the agency “continues to focus its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.” Asked whether Jamal had done anything that would have placed him in this category, the official said that, “as ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan has made clear, ICE does not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential

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