Samuel Anthony turns his phone camera around to show me the view from his family home in Sierra Leone. He steps out to a veranda overlooking a carpet of lush green trees dotted with houses that merge with the ocean in the distance.
“This is how the majority of people live in Sierra Leone,” Anthony tells me, pointing nearby to “pan body” single structures made of zinc. “In America, we call them camper homes.”
The landscape, we both agree, is breathtaking. “But that doesn’t help you financially,” he says.
When his mother passed away in 2021, Samuel Anthony couldn’t be there for the funeral.
Anthony may have been born in West Africa, but the United States is what he knows. Now 52, he left Sierra Leone in 1978 at the age of six with his older sister to join their parents who had crossed the Atlantic looking for better education. He grew up in Washington, DC, in the 1980s, around the city’s then–red light district of 14th street—a world away from where he finds himself more than four decades later.
In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Anthony was one of almost 360,000 immigrants deported that year. He had a decades-old drug conviction. Five years later, the president-elect is set to return to the White House vowing to supercharge mass deportation by the millions.
“When people have killed and murdered,” Trump told NBC News of his mass deportation plans, “when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here.”
Trump touts his deportation agenda as necessary to root out violent criminals. But chances are those targeted by the Trump administration will be people like Anthony, long-time residents who have some type of criminal record and baggage from an imperfect American life. (In fact, recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows the most common offenses committed by immigrants on the agency’s radar are traffic-related.)
“I didn’t come to America in hopes of becoming a drug dealer and being a bad person,” he says. “Just life, elements of things, not understanding myself put me in a negative spiral. My life spiraled out of control and I was never able to get back on the right track.”
Days before Trump’s inauguration, Anthony fears he might not have a chance to come back. “I never wanted to be here,” Anthony says. “I never looked like this would be my final resting spot in my life.”
Anthony’s childhood years as a new immigrant in Washington, DC, weren’t easy. In his mind, he was American. The world told him otherwise. “It wasn’t a period of what we call Kumbaya,” Anthony says, “everybody holding hands and singing a song. It was a very hostile era in America, just like we’re going through now with immigration.”
He remembers being bullied in school and struggling to fit in or make friends. “I wanted to be a part of American society,” he recalls. He felt at home and yet denied acceptance. “All I know is these American cities,” he says. “All I know is Washington, DC.”
When Anthony was about seven years old, he was sexually abused by a doctor. It wasn’t until later in life that he realized how what happened had affected him. “I have a difficult time trusting people,” he told me.
At the height of the drug era in the US capital, Anthony got involved with drugs. He started carrying weight-loss pills for other people and later began to sell crack cocaine and use PCP. His addiction led him to drop out of college.
“I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”
Anthony had a couple of run-ins with the police. In 1991, after intervening in a fight, he was badly beaten and taken to the hospital, where the police searched him and found drugs. Five years later, Anthony was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug offenses. He was sentenced to almost 20 years. At the 15-year mark, after Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act to address racial disparities, he was released early.
Upon his release, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picked Anthony up and transferred him to a detention center. He didn’t know his drug conviction would impact his immigration status, but he lost the green card he had gotten in 1989, and was put in deportation proceedings.
Because the US government couldn’t obtain his travel documents from Sierra Leone, they couldn’t deport him. Instead, ICE determined Anthony wasn’t a threat or a flight risk and released him in 2012 under an order of supervision that required him to report to the agency regularly.
Anthony started rebuilding his life. He obtained a commercial driver’s license and began working for a trucking company while also driving for Uber and Lyft. He bought a house and reconnected with family, including his daughter Samantha whose childhood he had missed while in prison. He also started a mentoring program to help formerly incarcerated people.
After Trump took office, in 2017, Anthony’s order of supervision became stricter. He was made to wear an ankle bracelet and had more regular check-ins with immigration. One day in July 2019, Anthony went in for what he thought was just another routine ICE appointment. But instead of letting him go, Anthony says the agents put him in a conference room, threw him on a table, and arrested him. He was blindsided.
Sarah Gilman, co-founder of the Rapid Defense Network, a legal nonprofit focused on detention and deportation defense that has joined forces with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, unsuccessfully tried to halt Anthony’s deportation in the courts, arguing it was illegal among other reasons because he had a pending case for a U visa—a special protection for undocumented victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement. (The Trump administration dropped a guidance encouraging ICE to not deport U visa applicants.)
“Historically, people like Samuel who have criminal convictions,” Gilman says, “even though they serve their time and they’ve [been] quote-unquote rehabilitated…they are often unusually subject to double punishment.” She adds: “What happened during Trump 1.0 was that everybody became a bad immigrant.”
ICE kept Anthony detained until December 2019. Then, they put him on a plane to Morocco and from there to Sierra Leone. He landed in the middle of the night and all he could see was darkness. Anthony remembers wishing he could walk into the ocean and never come back out.
“That’s what’s been happening for the last 22 years of my life,” he says. “I’ve just been falling and falling inside the pit and never seem to get the right footing.”
In Sierra Leone, Anthony has struggled with depression and health problems, including bouts of malaria, stomach issues, and weight loss. His status as a deportee who doesn’t speak the local dialect makes finding a job hard and leaves him prey to extortion. When his mother passed away in 2021, he couldn’t be there for the funeral.
“It was heart-wrenching for my mother,” Anthony’s older sister Samilia says “to the point that I think it contributed to her depression and ultimate passing.”
She hopes her brother’s story can make people reconsider how they view the immigration system. “It’s just not right,” Samilia says, “even if you have committed a crime, you’ve paid your dues. If America didn’t want those people, then maybe they should just send them home directly instead of having them be incarcerated for 15 years and then after that send them to nothing.”
Anthony’s lawyers have requested that ICE joins in a motion to re-open his deportation case and dismiss it so that he can have his legal permanent resident status restored. In an October letter in support of Anthony’s petition addressed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the acting director of ICE, former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote he should not have to “be held hostage to the federal government’s unpredictable shifts in immigration policy.”
Anthony is also applying for humanitarian parole to try and return to the United States while the Biden administration is still in office, but time is against him.
“If Samuel does not come home before Trump comes into power,” Gilman says, “he will never come home over the next four years. And I don’t know if Samuel will survive in Sierra Leone.”
Anthony has no idea how to start over almost 4,500 miles away from the only place he has ever called home. “Here, I don’t feel [a] sense of peace,” he says. “I feel chaos. I see confusion. I see pain. I see myself broken. It’s not easy.”
