A Rohingya refugee wanted freedom. America left him for dead in frigid Buffalo.
The U.S. Border Patrol abandoned a blind, disabled Rohingya refugee to die in frigid Buffalo, a new low for the Trump regime.
Like most of his Rohingya people — stripped of citizenship by Myanmar’s ruling junta and targeted by a brutal 2017 genocide — Nurul Amin Shah Alam and his family spent the last decade yearning to breathe free.
A nomadic quest for liberty took Shah Alam, his wife, and the two youngest of his six children through the crowded camps of Bangladesh, on a boat escape to Malaysia, and finally apparent refuge in the United States on Christmas Eve, 2024.
But the 56-year-old immigrant was almost never free on American soil.
In February 2025, just 53 days after his family arrived in the refugee hub of Buffalo, Shah Alam — nearly blind, apparently lost, and using a curtain rod as a walking stick — found himself in an encounter with Buffalo police. He was tased during a scuffle that ended with the refugee charged with felony assault.
After one year behind bars and a plea deal, relatives paid his bail on Feb. 19, 2026, and then waited for hours at the Erie County lockup, only to learn he’d instead been handed over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on an immigration detainer.
During a frantic, five-day search on the streets of one of America’s coldest big cities, Shah Alam’s family and supporters were stunned to learn that Border Patrol agents — apparently after learning the stateless refugee could not be legally deported — drove this disabled and nearly sightless man with no phone to a Tim Horton’s donut shop and dumped him there, five miles from his family’s home.
A Border Patrol spokesperson would later call this “a courtesy ride.”
Finally on Tuesday, Buffalo police were called to recover a dead body on a city street.
“He never had freedom in his life,” Imran Fazal, a leader of the Rohingya diaspora in Buffalo who knows his family, told me by phone Wednesday night. “He came to this country because he wanted to experience freedom. He didn’t have that chance ... He came to this nation that was supposed to save his life — and that nation destroyed his life."
Sham Alam’s name will be added to the growing death toll of a dishonorable Donald Trump regime, alongside Ruben Ray Martinez, Renee Nicole Good, Silverio Villegas González, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter, Geraldo Lunas Campos, and scores of others who’ve been shot, chased down, or sickened and neglected in squalid camps.
And now, abandoned on the sub-freezing February streets of the snow capital of America. Because there is really only one point to the ethnic cleansing crusade that began with rabid Trump partisans waving their “Mass Deportation Now!” placards in a Milwaukee arena and ended with a cold, lonely corpse on Perry Street.
Somehow, in this downward spiral that has seen Americans grow accustomed to masked, heavily armed goons in tactical gear snatching day laborers or Uber drivers off once-placid urban streets, the abandonment and death of Shah Alam still hits like a gut punch to the soul of a once-welcoming nation. Yet it somehow feels even more inhumane when viewed through the tortured prism of the Rohingya people, among the most persecuted ethnic minorities on earth.
The roughly 1.4 million, mostly Muslim, Rohingya people in Myanmar, formerly Burma, have been targeted for repression by that nation’s Buddhist majority for decades, culminating in the stripping of their citizenship in 1982 and its military rulers driving hundreds of thousands across the border into Bangladesh during 2017’s brutal campaign.
In March 2022, during the Joe Biden administration that was a brief window between the anti-refugee xenophobia of the two Trump presidencies, the U.S. government recognized the Rohingya as victims of genocide and, among other moves, expanded their resettlement opportunities in America. It’s estimated that at least 12,000 came to the United States during that short opening, and as many as 2,000 of them — perhaps lured by lower housing costs — have moved to Buffalo in the last couple of years.
It has not been an easy journey. Denied schooling in their native Myanmar and lacking a formal written script for their language, the majority of Rohingya who arrive in the United States are illiterate and unable to speak English.
The short, tragic American experience of Shah Alam reads like an allegory for the Rohingya plight on U.S. soil.
The version of what happened to him on the night of Feb. 15, 2025, as told to me by Fazal and also recounted by his family and lawyers in the media, is that Shah Alam, walking in his new neighborhood with the aid of that curtain rod and likely getting lost, took shelter under a porch perhaps without realizing he was on private property.
The woman who owned the property called the Buffalo police, who viewed the rod as a weapon and — when the non-English speaking Shah Alam failed to follow their commands — tased him and aggressively tried to arrest him. In a fight with the nearly blind immigrant whose awareness of the situation is in question, police said two officers suffered minor injuries. The ensuing criminal charges against Shah Alam — assault, trespassing and possession of a weapon — were just the start of his Kafkaesque journey through American injustice.
Trump had just become 47th president, and family members didn’t post bail at first, mainly because of fears the new regime would seek to deport him. Fazal said the already ailing Shah Alam lost considerable weight in his year behind bars, as much of the food didn’t meet his Muslim dietary restrictions.
Supported by the Rohingya diaspora community — Fazal said about 50 people attended one of his hearings — Shah Alam’s legal-aid attorneys eventually struck a misdemeanor plea deal. Then on Feb. 19, family members arrived at the Erie County detention center expecting to take him home for a warm meal.
After a number of hours, Fazal said, the family called the police and said, “‘He was supposed to come here. He’s not coming.’ And they said, ‘You know, he was taken by the [U.S.] Customs and Border {Protection].’ And they said, ‘what?!’”
A CBP spokesperson told People magazine that Shah Alam was offered a “courtesy ride” from Border Patrol agents, “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 ... He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance.”
In fact, Shah Alam — completely blind in one eye and with limited sight in the other, according to family members, who didn’t have a cellphone and had never used one — was five miles from his family’s current home. When his relatives and attorneys learned belatedly of the Tim Horton’s drop-off and could not find him, they filed a missing persons report that — in one final injustice — was, for a time, accidentally listed as resolved by an officer who mistakenly thought he was at an immigration detention site.
Instead, his body was found Tuesday night. The preliminary finding after an autopsy by the Erie County medical examiner is that Shah Alam died from medical causes and not from either exposure to the cold or intentional homicide. Nonetheless, his death is under investigation — yes, by the same Buffalo police who initiated this nightmare — and has sparked justifiable outrage from local officials like Buffalo Mayor Sean M. Ryan, who called the CBP actions “unprofessional and inhumane.”
» READ MORE: People are dying in Trump’s squalid concentration camps
That’s a gross understatement. It’s not just that Shah Alam’s abandonment and death is a new twist on the roughly 40 immigrants who’ve died in federal detention since the start of 2025 from a mix of medical neglect, suicidal despair, and at least one homicide, along with the eight people fatally shot by CBP or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All of it is proof that Trump’s immigration policy is written with the blood of innocents.
We also need to ask ourselves how and why a nation that so blithely uses the Statue of Liberty for everything from car-insurance ads to a morally empty 250th birthday party is now repressing some of the most mistreated humans on earth — people who honestly believed that America would offer the freedom they were denied in their nation of birth.
It’s a moral abomination to see the Hmong people who risked everything to side with the United States in Southeast Asia now dragged from their homes in Minnesota, or the Venezuelans who fled a strongman dictator only to be branded as criminal gang members, or the Haitians who escaped relentless violence only to now huddle in fear in heartland Ohio.
And now the Rohingya who were able to survive a genocide and inhumane refugee camps some 8,000 miles away only to now find themselves in a country that is building concentration camps and forging a 21st century trail of tears.
Fazal — a 30-year-old recent Buffalo State grad whose seven-year stateless flight to freedom passed through Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia (where he was detained for 17 months in an immigration prison), Australia, and Papau New Guinea — told me that he feels anger over Shah Alam’s death but also guilt, because he has gained U.S. citizenship while Shah Alam did not.
“The system and the police should be accountable,” he said. “We need justice to be served.”
When this newest stain on human existence is finally over, there won’t be enough courtrooms to try every masked idiot who shot an unarmed protester, or beat up an immigrant and swore that he “ran into a wall,” or slammed a brain-injured woman to the asphalt.
But years in prison would be too good for the soulless monsters who went on a donut run and left a good man to die. If there is any justice under God’s universe, they will be consigned for all of eternity to a snowdrift as large as Lake Erie in an unending and fruitless quest for the warmth and liberty they deprived Nurul Amin Shah Alam.