Paid subscribers make my reporting possible. Consider joining them:
Editor’s Note: This story includes descriptions of self-harm. Names marked with an asterisk have been changed for safety reasons.
A 30-year-old Uzbek man was flown in shackles from the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center (NWIPC) in Tacoma, Washington, within hours of a suicide attempt earlier this month, advocates said. Less than a week later, he disappeared entirely from the ICE Online Detainee Locator System as a deportation flight left Alexandria, Louisiana, on the evening of March 9.
The story of Abdulloh*, who entered the U.S. and filed an asylum claim in 2023 only to spend the next two and a half years jailed before his suicide attempt and deportation, exemplifies the cruelty of the U.S. immigration system and its reckless speed under the second Trump administration. It also reveals the care and commitment of the everyday people fighting Trump’s mass deportation agenda and bearing witness to its violence.
“The second I found out that he might be in a hospital, I started calling and doing anything that I could to try to find out where he was, if he was okay, and to get someone to tell him that we’re watching, we care, and we’re trying to help him,” said *Sara, an advocate who had been meeting with Abdulloh regularly since December 2025. Abdulloh gave Sara permission to share his story with the press.
Late at night on March 2, Sara received a call from another person jailed at NWIPC, who, in a panic, told her that Abdulloh had tried to end his life because of his pending deportation. “The immigration system is built to make people give up,” said Josefina Mora-Cheung, director of organizing at Washington-based immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “Some go to extreme lengths to try to avoid the pain that can come with both being in detention and with the fear of returning to their country, potentially to violence, or to even lose their lives.”
After the March 2 call, advocates and legal representatives were unable to locate Abdulloh until an update to the detainee locator on March 4 placed him thousands of miles away at the Port Isabel ICE Detention Center in southeastern Texas.
A live stream, archived by activists, showing the boarding of an ICE flight from King County International Airport in Tacoma on the morning of March 3, later allowed Sara to confirm that Abdulloh had been shackled and loaded onto a plane within 12 hours of his suicide attempt at NWIPC. That started him on a journey that saw him incarcerated in multiple ICE jails across the southern U.S. over the next week, before being put on a deportation flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital.
Before fleeing the Central Asian nation in 2023, police near Abdulloh’s hometown in the Namangan Region jailed and tortured him for over two weeks, according to a statement he gave in support of his asylum claim. He said the officers accused him of being part of a radical religious group and of having a banned book.
Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, have documented the Uzbekistan government’s persecution of Muslims who practice Islam outside of official institutions and guidelines. A 2023 U.S. Department of State report on religious freedom in the nation raised its “continuing detention and imprisonment of individuals based on their religious beliefs.”
Abdulloh also said in his asylum claim that he was “scared to death…to return and be detained, tortured, and even killed by police.” He said he fled with his wife through Europe, to Mexico, and then across the U.S.–Mexico border because he believed “everyone [is] equal” in the U.S. and he “wanted to live safe[ly] and not be scared.”
Instead, he was jailed on arrival and separated from his wife, who was pregnant with their first child. She was granted humanitarian parole. Their daughter was born in May 2024, but Abdulloh never met her and lost touch with his wife when their daughter was around three months old, a little over a year into his imprisonment.
“He was really devastated,” said Sara. “But I also think that for his own survival mode, he would rather focus on what he can do to get out of the situation and not dwell too much on the heartbreak of it.”
Abdulloh pursued every available avenue, spending hours reading case law and sharing information with his legal representatives and advocates, including Sara, so she could make calls on his behalf. But on February 28, news came that a judge had denied Abdulloh’s claim in a final review. “There was nothing else at that point we could do,” Sara said.
Two nights later, she got the panicked call that Abdulloh had tried to end his life in ICE jail. The following morning, he was on a flight out of Washington.
The detainee locator system last placed Abdulloh at an ICE lockup in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, according to advocates. That’s about a 45-minute drive away from the Alexandria Staging Facility, where he likely took his last steps on U.S. soil before the March 9 flight departed.
Journalist Gillian Brockell, who covers ICE flights, confirmed that the flight was an ICE removal flight and tracked it to Tashkent, where it landed on the morning of March 11, about 32 hours after its departure from Alexandria and stopovers to abandon other immigrants in Romania and Moldova.
The Alexandria facility has emerged as a major hub for the Trump administration’s deportation machine. Tens of thousands of people are deported from the center each year. Most are never seen or heard from again. “[Abdulloh’s] story, unfortunately, is not unique,” said Mora-Cheung. “There are thousands of people in detention across the country facing very similar conditions and very similar fear.”
Now that Abdulloh has been disappeared at the hands of the Trump administration, Sara is grieving their friendship and the opportunities he never had in the U.S. “The idea that he was so close to Mount Rainier and he never got to see it really made me sad,” she said.
Mora-Cheung wishes he had been allowed to make a home in the Washington community that rallied around him while he was jailed: “We have a community here, waiting for him to be free.”
John Loeppky edited this story.
