The Death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam

First, a few links! In this week’s podcast episode, I look at a Texas facility where the Trump administration is sending pregnant minors in immigration detention. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here. 

Unfortunately, a lot has been happening with detention camps in the U.S. of late. Fortunately, a lot of people are paying attention. Last week, Jamelle Bouie was kind enough to talk with me about everything that’s happening on that front for the New York Times. I also spoke with Elad Nehorai for the “Here We Come” podcast. And next week, I’ll be doing a call for the grassroots group 50501 on March 5, covering ways to think about pushing back on immigrant detention facilities coming your community and why it matters. You can register for it here.

This week, there’s been an outpouring of rage and grief over the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a vision-impaired Rohingya man whose body was found days after being dropped off by Border Patrol agents outside a coffee shop in Buffalo, N.Y. They left him outside in freezing temperatures without winter clothes or even, it appears, any shoes but prison booties.

Shah Alam had entered the U.S. as a refugee from Myanmar late in 2024. Just months later, he’d been tased and arrested after the police—not understanding what he was saying—interpreted the curtain rod he was holding as a weapon. After nearly a year in jail, during which his attorneys were worried that posting bail would simply allow him to be deported, a reduced bond was posted, and he was set for release.

The sheriff’s office contacted Border Patrol, which picked him up. After agents found Shah Alam wasn’t deportable, they left him outside a convenience store. His body was discovered days later five miles away.

The viciousness of current U.S. immigration policy was underlined by this terrible loss. The death of Shah Alam completed a historical loop that opened for me with two related events in 2015. The first was Donald Trump riding down the gold escalator at Trump Tower on June 16 of that year to announce his candidacy for president of the United States. His opening speech, delivered to attendees he’d paid to show up, was filled with hateful references to immigrants.

The other event took place two weeks later, when I flew to Myanmar to report from there for my history of concentration camps. My main goal was to travel to the western state of Rakhine, where more than 140,000 Rohingya Muslims had been detained in camps starting in 2012. (These were Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s people.)

In the majority-Buddhist nation, the Rohingya are often characterized as illegal immigrants, though many have lived in Myanmar for generations—going to college, owning small businesses, and even running for office. Yet for decades, extremists there have described them as animals and broadly depicted them as dangerous, leading to a poisoned public discourse that even then seemed incapable of addressing how malevolent actors were using propaganda to benefit politically from shifting demographics.

I started out in Yangon, the former capital, where I met with Rohingya activists and legislators. Then I continued on to Sittwe, Rakhine state’s capital, a city from which the Rohingya had been purged, except for a ghetto called Aung Mingalar. I’d gotten official permission from the federal government in advance to visit the Rohingya in what were officially called IDP camps, camps for displaced persons, that sat outside the city. But when I arrived, state authorities told me that no one was allowed to enter for the time being.

I didn’t want to have gone so far and not get the story. My contacts were able to smuggle me inside the camps, as well as Aung Mingalar, without permission.

It was the rainy season, and I witnessed people three years into unexpected detention trying to deal with flooding, limited access to health care, and no idea what their future—or their children’s future—might be. (I wrote more about their lives in the last chapter of my history of concentration camps.)

But I also spoke to another group of people while I was in Sittwe. I wanted to hear from non-Rohingya city residents about how they felt knowing their neighbors had been expelled from town and were living in camps.

The answers I heard from a number of people repeated the same language that Trump had just used after riding the escalator in New York City. In fact, the vile language was so much the same that I thought perhaps they were borrowing it, knowing I was American and wanting to put the ideas in terms that would be familiar to me.

But when I asked if they knew the name Donald Trump, I found that he was not yet on their radar. He’d just declared his candidacy, and was eight months from winning even the primary. It turned out that the language of hatred and demagoguery used for propaganda was simply the same around the world. This was something I had already known from historical research, but it was another thing to have it so clearly demonstrated in real time, as history was unfolding.

It didn’t take long—a year—for residents of Sittwe to discover Trump. And some of them liked him very much. On November 9, 2016, the day after the U.S. presidential election, a banner appeared in Sittwe, celebrating his victory.

By then, the military had already moved against areas north of the camps I had visited, destroying hundreds of Rohingya villages, and killing at least a thousand. The spike in violence terrified thousands and thousands more into crossing the border into Bangladesh, where Rohingya refugees previously expelled have been living in terrible conditions for decades.

Legislative and presidential elections were held, but the continued push toward democracy (which I’ll write about another time) didn’t help the Rohingya. Hundreds more villages were razed; thousands more Rohingya civilians were slaughtered.

And in February 2021, hopes for future democracy were dealt yet another blow. The generals staged a coup, dragging Myanmar back into full dictatorship. In 2022, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced the official position of the U.S. government that Myanmar’s military had committed genocide against the Rohingya.

So when I read about the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who entered the U.S. two years later as a refugee from Myanmar, it was a terrible blow. He had managed to escape lethal danger and mistreatment in Myanmar, only to die from hatred and cruelty on the streets of my country.

What a tragedy for him to encounter parallel hatred and indifference here, half a world away, and to be faced with brutal police and Border Patrol agents who killed him through malicious negligence.

Inside the camps and in the ghetto region of Sittwe, as you surely guessed, the Rohingya were no different than any group I had met around the world, in or out of camps. Even in detention, they were trying to educate their children. They were preparing meals for a religious feast. They were looking for odd jobs in a place with few options, trying to do the best they could to get by in a gig economy with a very limited amount of money circulating. (See the photo of the camp barber, above.)

At one point, armed guards found me. I was, in fact, breaking the law. One of them aimed an automatic weapon at my chest. Luckily, I still had the paperwork that had originally authorized my visit to the camps in my bag. Even though access had been cancelled for all foreigners during my time there, the guards couldn’t be sure from looking at my stamped letters whether some exception had somehow been made for me.

So they told me I couldn’t stay long. And they left me in the hands of my interpreter—someone who could see to my safety. They even answered some of my questions before continuing on their way.

They were young men who were agents of a brutal police state. How terrible that Nurul Amin Shah Alam did not get even that much consideration from the American agents in control of his fate in Buffalo. We must demand accountability for the death of someone who came here hoping for safety in a new home, crossing half the world for the possibility that he might be allowed just to live.

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