It was a humid June morning when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents knocked on the door of a modest condo in North Miami Beach, Florida, just across the canal from Greynolds Park — a relic of the New Deal, shaded by old oaks. They weren’t conducting a sweep. They had come for Foad Farahi, a Sunni imam who had lived in the area for more than 30 years.

Farahi was taken to a detention center in Miami and then put on a government plane to Texas, bound for a different detention facility. Later, he was moved again, this time to Torrance County Detention Center: a bleak, privately run complex in the remote deserts of New Mexico, where recent reports describe sewage backups and a lack of clean drinking water. He’s been locked up there ever since.

Farahi, 50, is one of thousands who have been swept up by ICE since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. But this wasn’t the first time the U.S. government had backed him into a corner. Nearly 20 years earlier, in the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. officials tried to use the threat of deportation as leverage to turn him into an informant against his own community.

He refused. He wasn’t deported, and he never became an informant. For years after, he lived in the shadow of the immigration system, checking in with authorities, complying with every rule. Now, his lawyers argue, his detention is less about process than punishment. “Mr. Farahi’s detention appears to be purely punitive,” they wrote in a recent habeas petition in federal court in New Mexico.

Farahi’s story stretches across two decades of American security policy, linking the FBI’s post-9/11 informant machine to today’s immigration dragnet. His treatment has long raised questions about whether the FBI weaponized immigration enforcement as a tool of coercion and what it means when saying no to the government results in a life sentence in limbo.

“We Want You to Work With Us”

Farahi’s fight with the government began in November 2004. As he walked home from evening prayers in North Miami Beach, he saw two men waiting outside his apartment. They introduced themselves as FBI agents.

The country was still in the grip of post-9/11 panic, and the agents wanted information about two men who had attended Farahi’s mosque: José Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber” accused of plotting to set off a crude radioactive device, and Adnan El Shukrijumah, a Saudi national who became a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda after leaving the U.S.

Farahi said he’d talk, but only in the open. He wanted his congregation to know why he was speaking to the FBI. The federal agents wanted something very different: secrecy.

“We want you to work with us,” they told him. “We’ll give you residency. We’ll give you money to go to school.”

“I can’t,” he told them. To him, becoming an informant would have meant betraying his faith community. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” Farahi said to me years ago, when I first asked him about his encounter with the FBI. “That’s where the problem is.”

The agents left, but the pressure never did. In 2007, at a routine asylum hearing, ICE agents gave Farahi an ultimatum: Drop his asylum claim and agree to be deported, or face federal terrorism charges. The subtext was clear: There was another way out — become an informant.

A Policy of Coercion

I first wrote about Farahi’s case in 2009, when it was one of the earliest public examples of the FBI using immigration to recruit Muslim informants. At the time, the FBI denied the practice outright. As other journalists uncovered similar cases, the FBI continued to deny. 

Years later, FBI agent Terry Albury leaked internal documents to The Intercept, confirming what Farahi’s case had suggested: using immigration as leverage wasn’t a rogue practice, but rather had been codified in the pages of the FBI’s internal policy manuals. 

FBI agents were even tasked under official policy with helping deport informants who were “no longer suitable for use” — an acknowledgment that the policy goal wasn’t transactional so much as coercive. 

For years, FBI agents and their informants probed and surveilled Farahi, always coming up short on evidence. The FBI recruited a con man named Mohammed Agbareia to work as an informant in Florida and tasked him with befriending Farahi. “Farahi was a person of interest,” Agbareia later told me. 

While working for the FBI, Agbareia was bilking Muslim communities nationwide using a stranded-traveler scam — calling mosques and claiming he was on his way, something had happened, just needed some money to get there — but FBI agents allowed his scams to continue and protected him from deportation, because he was useful for spying on Muslims like Farahi.

The unrelenting investigations of Farahi never yielded charges. Farahi has never been credibly accused of terrorism, much less indicted. The government’s ongoing suspicion appears to stem, in part, from a single FBI report from 2007 alleging that Farahi was a Muslim Brotherhood recruiter — based entirely on the claims of a source in Trinidad who offered no evidence.

His actual record consists only of a 2003 case for driving on a suspended license.

In 2020, an immigration court judge denied Farahi’s asylum claim but ruled that he could not be deported to Iran, his country of citizenship. As a Sunni Muslim, Farahi faces likely religious persecution in majority-Shia Iran, the judge determined.

The ruling left Farahi in immigration limbo. Under a so-called “withholding of removal” order, he could not be sent to Iran, but he also had no legal status. He could remain in the U.S. on the condition that he check in with immigration officials every six months. He complied, without fail, for years.

The Crackdown

Then came Trump’s immigration crackdown. Detention has ballooned to record levels, with more than 60,000 people now held in immigration detention, compared to a high of fewer than 40,000 under former President Joe Biden. 

The Trump administration has implemented sweeping new tools: expedited removals, raids in sanctuary cities, and deportation flights to third countries — even where individuals lack ties. ICE has struck deals with Uganda, Eswatini, Rwanda, and South Sudan to accept deportees, while others were dropped at El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, built for gang crackdowns and now housing migrants under a U.S. agreement to pay El Salvador $6 million.

Lawyers for men deported to Eswatini say they were delivered into prisons without due process, just as happened in El Salvador — signs of how the U.S. government’s deportation practices are outsourcing indefinite confinement to countries with poor human rights records. 

Farahi is now trapped in this sprawling, multinational system of deportation and detention. After three decades in the U.S., he’s facing the greatest risk of being forced out. Where to? For months, no one would say. “He hasn’t been told where they would send him, if anywhere,” his lawyer, Kenia Garcia, told me.

This week, that silence broke. ICE told Farahi they were asking Kuwait to take him. Farahi grew up there, but he was never a citizen, and he knows Kuwait could simply send him on to Iran — the very danger he fled when he arrived in the U.S. at 19 years old.

ICE declined an invitation to comment on Farahi’s case.

What began for Farahi with a knock on his door in 2004 has ended with another in 2025, and what began as a counterterrorism strategy has evolved into a system that wields detention and deportation not as tools of security, but as punishments in their own right.

The post This Imam Refused to Be an FBI Informant. Now ICE Wants to Deport Him. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.