He was out there somewhere, forsaken in the city where he had sought sanctuary. His damaged eyes blurring the foreign world around him, he was lost in the snow-caked Buffalo sprawl, underfed, underdressed, speaking a language few understood.<\/p>\n
Where was Nurul Amin Shah Alam?<\/p>\n
Six days had passed since Border Patrol agents intercepted the Rohingya refugee upon his release from a downtown jail, where he had spent a year for a police incident rooted in confusion. With no reason to detain him, the agents addressed the mistake by leaving the disabled man, still wearing jail-issue orange canvas shoes, in a darkened parking lot without informing anyone, even his family.<\/p>\n
Six days, then, since Nurul Amin, a 56-year-old grandfather despondent over broken American promises, had last been seen, and only then as a specter trudging past a security camera and into the pewter grayness of a Rust Belt winter.<\/p>\n
Where did he go?<\/p>\n
The question hung like black crepe in his family\u2019s small apartment on Buffalo\u2019s distressed east side. Adorning the yellow walls were Islamic decorations and a framed certificate awarded by a local school to his 11-year-old son, Yassin. Beyond the front window loomed a 19th-century Roman Catholic basilica named after a Polish saint, a rarely used remnant of an earlier immigrant wave.<\/p>\n
The missing man\u2019s wife, Fatimah, and another son, 22-year-old Faisal, were meeting with two people from the agency that had resettled the family in Buffalo a year earlier. With the help of an English-speaking friend, they conferred on what else could be done, now that \u201cmissing\u201d posters had been circulated, the police alerted, the shelters scoured.<\/p>\n
The friend paused the somber discussion to tell someone calling his cellphone that he was in an important meeting and couldn\u2019t talk. The caller said this was more important: A body had been found.<\/p>\n
Soon a photograph of a dead man was being beamed across the city to a sparse apartment brimming with dread. How could the government just snatch the family\u2019s patriarch and then leave him to a winter night\u2019s mercy? Why hadn\u2019t they called the family? Didn\u2019t they notice his damaged eyes? His inability to speak English?<\/p>\n
What kind of country was this?<\/p>\n
Then, with the family\u2019s future balanced in the moment, Faisal Nurul Amin, the worry-wearied son of the missing man, opened the image.<\/p>\n
His father.<\/p>\n
In the weeks to come, the story of Nurul Amin Shah Alam would attract international attention, his case seen by many as emblematic of a dehumanizing cruelty coursing through the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown. But for six days the refugee was simply lost in the strangeness of Buffalo.<\/p>\n
Abandoned in the dark, rutted parking lot of a run-down strip mall, Nurul Amin would have sensed the shadowy unwelcome of closed and vacant storefronts. He would have discerned the deceiving glow of a Tim Hortons doughnut shop, its doors locked but its drive-thru window still open. He began walking south toward Niagara Street, which ends downtown five miles away, near the Art Deco colossus of a city hall.<\/p>\n
Buffalonians are proud of their city\u2019s sports teams, majestic architecture and reputation for welcome \u2014 all reflected along Niagara Street as it weaves past old and new, snaking under a train trestle with a paint-peeled mural that spells Buffalo. Here, the ghostly remnants of a grain mill; there, the campus of a global food company. Here, weathered two-story homes; there, luxury loft apartments. A Buffalo Bills sign. A shuttered tavern. A former Prohibition-era bootlegging warehouse transformed into a small-business bazaar featuring Egyptian food, Afghan food, Thai, Korean, Congolese.<\/p>\n
Wandering south like the blind protagonist of a Greek tragedy, Nurul Amin might have hewed to Niagara Street. To the right hummed Interstate 190; beyond the highway, the Niagara River; beyond the river, Canada. Wherever he was, signs and passersby were of no use; he spoke no English, and was illiterate.<\/p>\n
\u201cImagine if he had been able to say, \u2018Help me, I\u2019m lost,\u2019\u201d said the family friend, who is known as Prince Arakan.<\/p>\n
Prince Arakan had joined the missing man\u2019s son Faisal and several young men from the city\u2019s small Rohingya community in a Buffalo-wide search. On lampposts and storefront windows, they taped posters of the dark-skinned Southeast Asian man with an impaired left eye.<\/p>\n
\u201cNurul Amin is mostly blind and unable to communicate in English,\u201d the posters said. \u201cHe only speaks Rohingya. He is 56 and has back problems, difficulty walking and is in poor health. He is not able to use a phone and does not know phone numbers or addresses.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you for being the City of Good Neighbors, Buffalo!\u201d<\/p>\n
The earnest words met wintry silence. Was he eating? Was he sleeping? Where was Nurul Amin?<\/p>\n
On the misty Thursday night that he faded from view, the temperature lingered around 40 degrees. The next day, a gusty Friday, light rain turned to light snow. The snow gave way on Saturday to a freezing drizzle, but returned on Sunday and fell through the night.<\/p>\n
On Monday, the February weather of western New York asserted itself. The temperature dropped below 20 degrees by midnight and plummeted into early Tuesday. At breakfast, it was 12 degrees.<\/p>\n
Around dinnertime, at 5:30, a woman was walking in the downtown area dominated by the KeyBank Center, home of the Buffalo Sabres. With the hockey team out of town, this stretch of Perry Street was quiet, the vast parking lot empty, the soaring bank building across from the arena long vacant. The area\u2019s security cameras, recently vandalized, were offline.<\/p>\n
The woman noticed a man on the ground. He wore a dark parka, khaki pants and one prison-orange canvas shoe. Detecting movement, she walked on.<\/p>\n
Three hours later she walked past the closed bank building again, saw the same man, body still, hands gray, and called 911. Fourteen months to the day after his arrival in the United States, Nurul Amin Shah Alam lay dead on the Buffalo pavement.<\/p>\n
The Erie County medical examiner later determined that a stress-induced ulcer had allowed gastric acid to leak into his belly, causing excruciating pain. The official cause of death: complications of a perforated ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration.<\/p>\n
The official manner: homicide, meaning that the death resulted \u201cfrom the volitional acts of another, which may include negligent acts or omissions\u201d \u2014 a medical determination that leaves the question of criminality to the judicial system. Law enforcement officials say the death remains under investigation.<\/p>\n
In terms of geography, Nurul Amin came from the town of Maungdaw, in Rakhine State, on the western coast of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But in truth, he came from a state of internal displacement: As a Rohingya, he was part of a Muslim minority essentially stripped of Myanmar citizenship decades ago and subjected ever since to an increasing repression of rights, the burning of mosques, the destruction of villages, even what the United States has called genocide.<\/p>\n
Uneducated and poor, Nurul Amin navigated life with a left eye damaged in infancy by the poke of a stick. He worked in the rice fields and at a fishery, raising chickens and a few crops on the side, happiest when a rich harvest meant a family feast.<\/p>\n
After an arranged marriage, he and his wife, Fatimah, started a family, but the repression became too much, with the Myanmar military forcing Rohingya men like Nurul Amin into unpaid manual labor, cutting down trees, clearing roads. In 2003, he made his way alone to a refugee camp in Bangladesh, and then to Malaysia, where Rohingya are often exploited, but where he could work off the books as a laborer and send money home.<\/p>\n
Fearing that his four sons would also be forced into servitude, Nurul Amin arranged for them to join him, one by one. By 2013, the entire family was in Malaysia, with a fifth son, Yassin, soon to be born.<\/p>\n
Nurul Amin then began the rigorous, yearslong process of resettlement. \u201cRefugees are vetted more intensively than any other group seeking to enter the U.S.,\u201d according to the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian aid organization. \u201cIn fact, the hardest way to come to the country is as a refugee.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees identified him as being in need of resettlement, his case was forwarded to the U.S. refugee admissions program for a screening process that included biometric collection, medical examinations, document verification, in-person interviews and a security assessment by a fleet of federal agencies. In 2015, Nurul Amin was approved.<\/p>\n
But when told that only his wife and two youngest sons, both minors, could join him, he declined the offer, refusing to break up the family, his son Faisal said. His case was deferred until 2024, when it appeared that the Biden administration would also allow Nurul Amin\u2019s three older sons and their families to resettle.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Once we process their paperwork, they will join you in America,\u2019\u201d Faisal said the family was told. \u201cThey said within six months.\u201d<\/p>\n
After traveling more than 8,000 miles, Nurul Amin and part of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve. Faisal bent down to touch the snow that symbolized their new reality: Buffalo.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery exciting,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n
Buffalo has benefited from the presence of families like Nurul Amin\u2019s. Immigrants, including a Bangladeshi wave moving up from New York City, and refugees, including people from Myanmar, have revived dying neighborhoods, diversified the culture and spurred the city\u2019s first growth since 1950, when it had more than double the current population of 278,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t have economic growth without population growth,\u201d the mayor, Sean M. Ryan, said in an interview. \u201cAnd the new Americans have been Buffalo\u2019s economic lifeblood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caseworkers for one of the city\u2019s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house. A caseworker helped them to adjust. What to wear in the cold. Where to buy provisions. How to enroll in school. How to find employment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is cost-positive programming,\u201d said Molly Carr, the chief executive of Jewish Family Services of Western New York. \u201cWe invest up front in somebody, knowing that, overwhelmingly, the individuals we invest in will become contributing members of the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yassin received a \u201cHeart of a Dragon Award\u201d certificate from his elementary school. Faisal began assembling the documentation he needed to get a job. Fatimah cooked the rice, curries and other familiar food found at immigrant-owned markets. And on Jan. 20, 2025, as the patriarch waited for the rest of his family to arrive, Donald Trump took the presidential oath.<\/p>\n