Abdoul Abdi, 23, makes no excuses for the crime he committed but, facing deportation to a country so dangerous Canadian officials can’t even travel to some parts, he feels like he’s on death row.
Abdi spoke with The Chronicle Herald from Dorchester Penitentiary, where he is serving out the last few months of his five-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
Under normal circumstances, he would be getting released in January. Instead, he’s fighting to stay in the country he has called home almost his entire life.
Abdi was six when he and his older sister came to Nova Scotia from Somalia, a war-torn country that was recently the site of a terrorist attack that took 500 lives.
“I was very young, but I saw a lot of my family members die, like my grandparents, my sister, my aunts and uncles and my mum,” he said.
“When my two aunts told me we were going to Canada, I kind of understood.”
In 2014, Abdi pleaded guilty to aggravated assault — he beat a man with the handle of a gun following an altercation, and the victim required 14 staples to close his head wound — as well as assaulting a police officer with a car, theft of a motor vehicle and dangerous driving.
Because of his crime, Abdi was deemed inadmissible to Canada in July 2016, according to immigration laws. In December, he sought an application for leave and judicial review in Federal Court against Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, hoping to overturn the decision and have his case re-examined. That Federal Court hearing took place last month, and Abdi is waiting for the decision.
Much of the case rests on whether the judge will take into account Abdi’s troubled upbringing in the care of Nova Scotia’s Community Services Department, which is detailed in affidavits and other court documents.
Talking to Abdi, it’s clear he’s taken full responsibility for the crimes he committed, and he’s adamant he’s not trying to blame anyone else for that part of his past. But he also knows what happened to him as a child should not happen to anyone seeking refuge in what was supposed to be a safe country.
It’s something that hits him even harder now that he has a little girl of his own.
“You grow up . . . a certain way and you think, ‘That’s how I gotta live,’ that certain way, how life made you, and that’s how I felt, but prison has been a reality check.”
When Abdi arrived in Canada, he and his sister were almost immediately taken from his family and placed into care. He said they learned English quickly because they were punished if they spoke in their native language.
Several years later, they were both placed in foster care with a Somali family.
“(The foster family) was the most traumatic in my memories of being in care. The group homes, they had their bad, but that was definitely the worst,” he said.
“Being young, you don’t really know what abuse is or talking out or anything like that. The physical and mental abuse was severe to the point where I felt trapped.”
He tried to run away multiple times, but it wasn’t until he was 12 that he was removed from the situation.
“One day, all these social workers came to the house (and told me) ‘The foster family put in for an adoption and they’re changing your name. We’re not going to be involved anymore and you’re moving away with them,’” he said.
“That night I went and packed some stuff out of the fridge and stuff like that and stole their car.”
He didn’t have a plan. And, being 12, he didn’t know how to drive. In his young mind, all he wanted to do was find his sister, who had already been removed from the home, and drive somewhere safe.
“I got caught pretty quick, and when I got caught the social workers were like, ‘Yo, this is kind of crazy for you, what’s going on?’ And I kind of just broke down and said, ‘I can’t stay here no more, it’s too much,’ and that’s how I got out, that’s how I got free.”
He spent the rest of his childhood and early adulthood bouncing around from group home to group home, shelter to shelter.
Under ideal circumstances, a child arriving in Canada as a refugee would have a legal guardian apply for citizenship on their behalf. In Abdi’s case, that didn’t happen.
“When I was 13 or 14, my sister had contacted me and said she wanted a SIN card and I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t know what a Canadian citizen was,” he said.
Abdi and his sister met with a lawyer, along with a social worker who was co-ordinating the process. He was later told by the social worker the paperwork had been filed and it would take about 11 months before he would officially become a citizen.
He assumed the paperwork had gone through and didn’t think much more of it. “We don’t know if they ever even filed it,” he said.
If he had been a Canadian citizen instead of a permanent resident in 2014, he would have served his time and gone home. Instead, Abdi has to come to terms with the threat of deportation to a country where he fears he will face certain death.
“I don’t remember nothing, I don’t remember my language, I don’t remember the culture, I don’t remember the customs. When I first heard about deportation, I started doing my research and it was like my worst fears times 100,” Abdi said.
If he is able to stay in Canada, he said, he has a plan.
Abdi has been taking courses in prison to get high school and other certificates so he can work. He’s also taken anger management classes and said he is doing all he can to better himself and be a productive member of society.
“Believe it or not, I’ve got a lot of support. I’ve got safeguards and stuff. When I get out, I’ve got opportunities waiting for me, I’ve got jobs waiting for me, but the biggest thing I look forward to more than anything is to just catch up time with my daughter because I haven’t seen her since she was just tiny.”
Abdi said prison has put a lot of things into perspective, and he’s not interested in going back to the life he lived.
All he wants is a second chance.
“There’s a lot of nights I sit in my cell and I regret a lot of things, the biggest being this crime,” he said.
“On our dying beds, everybody, we’re going to wish we had one more minute, one more hour of life. I (lost) years of my life to something that didn’t even need to happen. It really makes me look at the bigger picture in life, and how you just need to be kind to the person next to you.”