Deported to Sierra Leone, he lost everything. He’s fighting to return.

Deported to Sierra Leone, he lost everything. He’s fighting to return.

“There was nothing but darkness. And you just know that everything’s over,” said Samuel Anthony, remembering the night he was forced to leave his home. “It was like being placed in a coffin. But you’re still alive.”

Anthony, 51, was talking to me from Sierra Leone, where he has been since 2019, when an immigration officer escorted him onto a plane at Dulles Airport that took off into the dark sky across the Atlantic to a country he left as a little boy.

To the Department of Homeland Security, Anthony is just one of 359,885 people deported from the United States that year.

To the family he left behind, he’s a man of promise, taken. Imperfect, as we all are. But in a national moment of reconsideration for those who’ve paid their dues, his loved ones say he never truly got a second chance.

“He struggled with addiction,” said Samilia Anthony, his sister. D.C. in the 1990s was awash in crack. Even the mayor — Marion Barry — was swept up in the mania that left thousands dead in a decade when Washington statistically became the nation’s murder capital.

Anthony went to one of D.C.’s best public high schools, studied at St. Augustine’s College in North Carolina and still fell into the life, struggling to overcome demons of childhood abuse that are finally being talked about, they both told me.

In 1996, he pleaded guilty to a drug charge and got a harsh, 20-year sentence over 50 grams of crack cocaine, according to court documents. Possession of crack in those years got sentences that averaged 4.8 times longer than if the cocaine had been powdered, according to the Department of Justice.

As sentencing reforms began to address the disparities in how our justice system approached the drug epidemic, particularly in the nation’s Black neighborhoods, Anthony’s sentence was reduced, and he was released early. But because he was a permanent U.S. resident — he had a green card but not citizenship — he went straight from prison to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he was back in custody until his successful release in 2014.

Anthony got out of immigration custody in time for some family milestones. The next year, he was deported back to their native Sierra Leone.

He did everything our system asked of him. He checked in regularly, got a job running a stock room at a grocery store, drove Ubers and started getting his commercial driver’s license. He bonded with his daughter and was the sibling who always checked in on mom. He bought a newly constructed townhouse in a revitalized section of Deanwood.

“Samuel was all about D.C.,” his sister said. He loved go-go music and the mom-and-pop joints around town. “He was making up for the time he lost in prison, spending a lot of time with family.”

He began a nonprofit mentoring teens who flirted with the life he left behind. But even living straight, he always felt scrutinized and endangered.

The United States deported just under 70,000 people in 1996, when Anthony went to prison, according to government data. As he was reentering life in D.C. in 2013, under the Obama administration, our nation reached its highest deportation numbers to date — 432,228.

Last year, the Biden administration doubled the amount of immigrants it deported the year before, as immigration becomes a key talking point in the upcoming election.

Anthony lived straight, did all his check-ins and didn’t tangle with the law again.

Anthony was in the United States long enough to see Shanel, his brother, married in 2018.

Then, in 2019, when he showed up for an annual appointment with the local ICE office, he was taken in. This was under the Trump administration, and the rhetoric against immigrants was rising. An immigrant from Africa with an arrest record, even if it was nonviolent, was a target.

Anthony was taken to Texas, where he was held for a while, then brought back to Dulles, where he was eventually put on a plane with nothing but the clothes he wore, a toothbrush and some thermal underwear he got in the Texas facility.

“Friday the 13th. Would you believe?” he said.

The plane laid over in Morocco for 15 hours, then he was taken to Sierra Leone, where he hadn’t been since the 1970s. There were new sounds, new smells, new foods and different people. He had some family members. Mostly, he was alone.

“All it was? It was depression. It was suicidal thoughts,” he said. “I was going to the beach and just wanting to go into the water and never come back.”

He’s found work here and there. But he hasn’t found a community. His accent is D.C., his mannerisms are D.C., and he doesn’t belong to either of the ruling political parties in Sierra Leone, which he says is the only way to get work. His return is seen — in society — as a badge of shame, he said.

He missed his mother’s death and couldn’t get a special visa to return for her funeral.

“Even though I was born here, I wasn’t raised here. I wasn’t brought up with this type of environment,” Anthony said. “America to me is everything. I went to school there, I was at university there, went to prison there, did everything there. To be honest, prison was easier than this.”

He is working with the National Immigrant Justice Center to try to get home.

That’s how I met him, through their associate director of policy, Nayna Gupta.

I first met her when she was trying to get Howard Bailey home. Bailey was a veteran who built a life, a trucking company and a family in Virginia when he was suddenly deported back to his native Jamaica — in a shocking 5:30 a.m. raid on his home in 2010 — because of an old marijuana conviction.

This veteran finally gets to return after being deported more than a decade ago

I followed his nightmare for years, as Gupta and the immigration lawyers she works with pushed for his return. It took 11 years. His wife had moved on, his company dissolved, but he returned, and we were there as he stepped off the plane.

Last year, I watched him get sworn in as a U.S. citizen.

Howard Bailey, a Navy veteran, finally became a U.S. citizen after a naturalization ceremony at the federal courthouse in Richmond 13 years after he was deported to his native Jamaica because of an old marijuana conviction. His mother, Jean, was there for his ceremony on June 21, 2023.

Anthony’s road may be harder. Unlike Bailey, his drug conviction was not pardoned.

“His story really resonates with me during Black History Month,” Gupta said. “It’s a glaring example of how we have tried to fix the worst harms imposed on Black families from the war on drugs but failed to do so for Black families who immigrated to the U.S. decades ago.”

In our infancy, still, on righting our wrongs, this nation of immigrants should dig deeper.