Omar Ameen has spent the last two years in jail as the Trump and Biden administrations attempted to extradite him to face certain death in Iraq. He is accused by local enemies in Iraq of committing a murder he could not possibly have committed because he and his family were in Turkey awaiting refugee status when it happened. Now a judge has ordered the government to release him; instead of following the judge's order, the Biden administration transferred Omar Ameen to ICE custody. The administration is weaponizing ICE to deny Omar his basic rights! Tell them we will not accept an America where innocent people are disappeared by the government after WINNING their trial.

Omar Ameen and his family fled tribal enemies in Iraq. These same enemies accused Omar of committing a murder he could not possibly have committed because he and his family were in Turkey awaiting refugee status when it happened. The two witnesses to the murder were illiterate and only signed statements blaming Omar for the murder because their son had been jailed and they were told he would be released if they signed the papers. When Omar’s lawyers told these witnesses what they had signed, they immediately redacted their statements. They said Omar Ameen had not been involved in the murder, and they never would have implicated him.

The United States government has proof that Omar physically could not have committed the murder because he was in another country when it happened. They know he will face certain death in Iraq if he is extradited. Yet the Trump administration is still determined to extradite him, the equivalent of murder. Omar’s extradition will fit Trump’s false narrative that ISIS has infiltrated the refugee stream, an assertion he has had trouble supporting because the only refugees ever involved in a terrorist attack in the United States were from Cuba.

According to Ben Taub, who broke Omar’s story,

“Wittingly or not, [government employees and their departments] have been co-opted into a campaign to extradite an innocent man to almost certain death, in order to make a racist talking point appear to be slightly less of a fiction.”

Ben Taub also describes in his article the questionable practices of the Iraqi “justice” (I am applying that word very loosely) system: “I watched death-penalty trials that lasted as little as four minutes. In one case, a judge ordered the execution of a man whose body was so broken from torture that he could hardly move or speak. [...] his lawyer explained, he couldn’t possibly have carried out the terrorist attack to which he had confessed —the police report said that it was a suicide bombing.”

The United States refuses to extradite people all the time. The US recently refused to extradite a woman to The United Kingdom, a nation that has a much better track record on fair trials than Iraq.

Please sign this petition to stop the extradition of Omar Ameen. The United States should never kill innocent people. To extradite Omar Ameen would be to commit murder.

If you want to do more, share this petition with people you know and organizations that might care. Email your Senator and other elected officials demanding they take a position on Omar Ameen’s extradition.

Make sure to read the full story by Ben Taub and, if you have the means, buy a subscription to The New Yorker. Every day The New Yorker defends democracy and human rights by supporting journalists like Ben Taub. Without The New Yorker, this story would have been hidden until Trump gleefully announced he had “deported a member of ISIS posing as a refugee.”

Read Ben Taub’s article for the full story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/the-fight-to-save-an-innocent-refugee-from-almost-certain-death

This is such an egregious perversion of justice, a conservative magazine wrote an article criticizing Omar Ameen’s extradition.  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-outrageous-case-of-omar-ameen/