Nascimento Blair returned home in shackles.
He landed in Jamaica in February, 21 years after he had abandoned the island, seated next to dozens of his countrymen who were also handcuffed. As he stepped off the plane at the seaside airport in Kingston and felt the scorching Caribbean sun of his youth, Mr. Blair, 46, was greeted with suspicion.
Still dazed, he looked out of place. He had on the same winter clothes — a peacoat, turtleneck, gray suit and Chelsea boots — he had been wearing when U.S. immigration authorities had abruptly detained him on a frigid morning in New York City weeks earlier.
He noticed his slightly Americanized accent as he sat through hours of interrogation by Jamaican authorities at the airport. And he felt like an outcast as Jamaican officials snapped his mug shot, took his fingerprints and asked about his past.
“They don’t look at you like a Jamaican,” Mr. Blair said. “They look at you like a criminal.”
Mr. Blair did not give them details about his past, an odyssey that began with a side hustle dealing marijuana in the New York suburbs as a 24-year-old Jamaican transplant, which led to a kidnapping conviction he disputed and a 15-year prison sentence he fulfilled.
It was his criminal past that had gotten him deported from the United States, where he had been rebuilding his life and seeking redemption. He had earned two college degrees, started a trucking business, mentored people released from prison, cared for a fiancée with breast cancer, taken classes at Columbia University.
None of it would stave off deportation: He was among the first few thousand immigrants scattered across the globe during the early days of President Trump’s deportation campaign.
On paper, Mr. Blair fit the profile of the people Mr. Trump says he wants to deport: those with criminal backgrounds. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security blamed the Biden administration for not deporting Mr. Blair sooner.
But to Mr. Blair and his supporters, his life story was one of rehabilitation, nuanced and filled with qualities that they believe Mr. Trump’s deportation machine disregards as it flies out immigrants en masse.
His removal from the United States and dizzying journey back to the Caribbean raises a fundamental question Americans are grappling with as they consider the president’s immigration crackdown: Who deserves to stay?
After shuttling between detention centers for weeks, Mr. Blair was back in Jamaica, a proud island known for revering its national heroes — Bob Marley, Usain Bolt, Marcus Garvey — but not for welcoming deportees warmly.
Mr. Blair was home, except Jamaica did not feel like home.
A Cryptic Call From ICE
A judge ordered Mr. Blair to be deported after he was convicted of kidnapping in 2006, accused of abducting an acquaintance who had stolen weed from his apartment. Yet he was allowed to remain in the United States after leaving prison in 2020 because the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency did not consider Mr. Blair a priority for deportation.
That was during Mr. Trump’s first term. He vowed it would be different in the second.
The deportation order loomed over Mr. Blair as he rebuilt his life after prison. Mr. Blair, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., and worked in Harlem, had to check in at the ICE office in downtown Manhattan seven times over five years. The visits became an uneventful ritual — getting a piece of paper signed by an immigration officer — that usually took just a few minutes.
But on Jan. 31, about two weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Blair got a call from an unknown number. It was ICE. An officer told him to report to the office in three days, much earlier than his previously scheduled May check-in.
Mr. Blair asked if everything was OK.
The officer was vague.
Immigration lawyers have noticed more people under ICE supervision receiving similar calls. People were arrested during ICE check-ins under the Biden administration, too, but the tactic appears to be growing under Mr. Trump as a way to easily detain immigrants without having to grab them in their homes or workplaces, which the agency argues puts its officers and the public at risk.
Mr. Blair, who goes by Blair, dressed up, as he typically did, and headed to the ICE office. Unlike many immigrants who wade through the country’s convoluted immigration system without legal or financial support, he was not alone.
Nearly 50 friends, supporters and New Yorkers — an unlikely contingent of community organizers, college professors and faith leaders — showed up outside in solidarity, bearing posters.
They had banded together to try to stop his deportation through a flurry of last-minute letters to ICE casting him in a sympathetic light — a rehabilitated man who had repaid his debt to society.
“I feel if Trump met him, he would think this guy makes America great,” said Dawn Ravella, a social worker who befriended Mr. Blair through a group she founded that supports former prisoners. “He was born in Jamaica, but made in America. A person who did something bad, had remorse, paid their dues and paid it forward by living a life of kindness and service.”
Mr. Blair entered the ICE office on Feb. 3 with his lawyer, Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia law professor and a criminal defense lawyer who was helping him on a pro bono basis.
They were ushered into a small room where three officers told them that they were taking Mr. Blair into custody. Mr. Harcourt tried to de-escalate the situation, but the officers told him he first had to fill out a form indicating that he was Mr. Blair’s lawyer.
Mr. Harcourt stepped out to complete the form. The door closed behind him. Inside the room, the officers pinned Mr. Blair to the wall, handcuffed him and whisked him away to a cell, Mr. Blair said.
“The way they tricked Blair into coming in to get arrested,” Mr. Harcourt said. “The way they tricked me to get me out of their sights. It was pure deceit, in a way that I don’t even experience in the deepest depths of the criminal justice system.”
From New York to Louisiana
It was close to midnight when Mr. Blair was transferred to a jail a short drive north in Orange County, N.Y., where ICE holds many people rounded up in New York.
ICE officers paraded Mr. Blair and other detainees before loading them into vans, posing for photos with the immigrants like trophies, he said.
“This is the new administration,” Mr. Blair recalled an officer telling him. “You weren’t a priority then, you’re a priority now.”
Mr. Blair was handed a yellow jumpsuit at the Orange County jail, his first time behind bars since leaving prison. The staff were respectful and he was allowed visitors, Mr. Blair said, but things deteriorated after his 17-day stay there.
On Feb. 21, his birthday, he was transferred with little explanation to a jail in Nassau County on Long Island. The next day, he was awakened about 3 a.m. and taken to Newark Liberty International Airport. There, he and other detainees were put on a plane operated by GlobalX, a charter company that is under contract to ICE. The detainees wore arm and leg restraints that left Mr. Blair’s wrists swollen.
The plane departed about 8:30 a.m., stopping in Boston, Buffalo and Pennsylvania to pick up others in custody, mostly men, Mr. Blair recalled. They landed more than 12 hours later in Louisiana, where Mr. Blair was given back his clothes and held for five days at a deportation staging facility.
That’s where Mr. Blair got a close-up look at the Trump administration’s deportation efforts: Detainees — Mexicans, Colombians, Guatemalans — were marched from the facility by nationality each day before being quickly replenished with more soon-to-be deportees.
“When 50 people leave in the morning, by 10:30 a.m., the door opens and 60 more people walk in,” Mr. Blair recalled.
A Conviction Haunts an Arrival
The GlobalX plane that landed at Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston at 11:29 a.m. on Feb. 27 — carrying Mr. Blair and more than 50 other Jamaicans — was the second deportation flight to Jamaica after Mr. Trump took office.
Caribbean nations have been bracing for an influx of flights packed with repatriated citizens, as well as people looking to self-deport to avoid the shame associated with deportation.
Jamaicans deported to the island, many of whom have criminal backgrounds, have long had to grapple with social stigma that stems from a widely held perception that deportees are unemployable, dangerous and destined to fuel crime.
Growing up, Mr. Blair attended an all-boys prep school in Jamaica and chased dreams of playing soccer in England. Yet in 2005, less than two years after moving to the United States on a work visa to join his father and other relatives in New York, the state with the largest Jamaican population, Mr. Blair wound up sitting in a Westchester jail.
Before landing in jail, Mr. Blair had joined a bustling Jamaican community in Westchester, where he moved into a basement apartment in Mount Vernon owned by his aunt. He settled into a job at a Brooklyn moving company, earning enough to send money back to his siblings. He also began meeting other Jamaicans, including some who sold marijuana, which was still criminalized at the time.
Mr. Blair soon began dealing. First, small amounts to co-workers. Then, about five pounds, worth thousands of dollars a week, he said.
“I got caught up selling weed and fell in love with the money,” he said. “I strayed from my soccer dreams.”
Those dreams were resoundingly shattered on Oct. 11, 2005, when an 18-year-old who lived in Mr. Blair’s building broke into his apartment and stole half a pound of marijuana and money. Mr. Blair did not report the break-in to the police, fearful of getting busted for possessing marijuana. Instead, he took matters into his own hands.
“Somebody took something from me, and I wanted to get it back,” he said.
Prosecutors and Mr. Blair differ on what happened next.
The police arrested him and two other men the following day, after they were accused of kidnapping the teenager, holding him at another apartment and demanding $5,000 from the teenager’s father over the phone. Mr. Blair was accused of pistol-whipping the 18-year-old and driving him to the apartment, where prosecutors say he was tied up. The police freed the teenager that night after raiding the apartment, where they found two handguns and two pounds of marijuana.
The two other suspects pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced sentences. Mr. Blair pleaded not guilty and went to trial in 2006 and faced seven felony counts, including kidnapping and weapon charges.
Mr. Blair admitted that he demanded money from the teenager but maintains that he never held him against his will, never hit him with a gun and never tied him up. During the two-week trial, Mr. Blair testified that police officers beat him while he was chained to a desk and coerced testimony that was used at the trial.
The jury struggled to render a verdict, and a mistrial seemed possible, but a judge instructed the jurors to continue deliberating after they said they were deadlocked, according to court documents. After five days of deliberations, the jury found Mr. Blair guilty of kidnapping in the first degree, but not the other charges.
A judge sentenced him to a prison term of 15 years to life.
A ‘Metamorphosis’ in Prison
The man from Jamaica stood out at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a notorious maximum-security prison. Indeed, by many accounts, the Nascimento Blair that emerged from prison on April 9, 2020, was a changed man.
He had learned, slowly, to let go after years spent in the prison’s law library challenging his conviction. In filings that he often wrote himself, Mr. Blair argued, unsuccessfully, that his court-appointed lawyer had failed to properly represent him and that some of his constitutional rights had been denied during trial.
“I noticed the part I played in my incarceration,” he said, maintaining that he had not kidnapped anyone, even as he took responsibility for selling weed illegally. “You wouldn’t run into crooked stuff if you weren’t doing crooked stuff.”
He soon turned to education. While incarcerated, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science from Mercy University and a master’s degree in leadership from the New York Theological Seminary.
He began writing poetry that he published online and in a newsletter that he circulated inside the prison. And he got married in 2012 to a Jamaican woman who visited him while he was in prison. Afforded conjugal visits, they had a son in 2014 but later divorced.
“Sing Sing was my metamorphosis,” said Mr. Blair, who made the dean’s list.
He had long assumed that ICE would pick him up after his release from prison and deport him, as the agency routinely does with immigrants after they serve their time. But on the day of his release, ICE informed the prison that it would not detain Mr. Blair, he said.
Still, when his aunt picked him up outside the prison, Mr. Blair sprinted to the car and reclined the passenger seat so he was hidden from view, in case ICE was waiting.
Given a chance to remain in the country, Mr. Blair began to rebuild his life. He enrolled at a Columbia program for former prisoners, the Justice-in-Education Initiative, and was considering applying for a doctoral program.
He obtained a work permit and became a health care caseworker at Harlem United, which provides H.I.V. care, mostly to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He became a mentor to people coming out of prison and joined the board of Rising Hope, which provides college education to inmates.
Freddy Medina, a formerly incarcerated man who works as a counselor for at-risk youth in Yonkers, said he met Mr. Blair more than a decade ago when Mr. Medina was searching for hope as “a young man with a troubled path and an unsure future.”
“Unbeknown to me that hope came from an unexpected place, and his name was Nascimento Blair,” Mr. Medina wrote in a letter to ICE. “He challenged me to look deeper into myself, and as a result, my behavior began to change and years later I am in direct service work helping others.”
Mr. Blair settled into the ground-floor apartment of a house in Yonkers, where he exercised in a makeshift gym on the porch, amassed a large collection of sneakers and worked from behind a desk in the living room, where he had framed a paralegal certificate from Columbia. He lived with his fiancée, who is also Jamaican, and had been caring for her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Five years had gone by since prison. He had recently purchased an 18-foot box truck, intending to one day have a trucking fleet. And he was thinking of buying a house next year.
“In a strange way, and going against any critique that I would have about the incarceration system in the United States, I would say that in Blair’s case, rehabilitation has worked,” said Neni Panourgiá, an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia who taught Mr. Blair and was given power of attorney to handle his affairs.
Rebuilding, Again, in Jamaica
The comforts Mr. Blair took for granted in the United States vanished in Jamaica.
His sister greeted him at the airport and let him stay in her house in the hills of Kirkland Heights, a breezy community overlooking Kingston where big houses are interspersed with more modest ones like his sister’s.
Just a few days after arriving, Mr. Blair was showering and flushing with buckets of water as the family dealt with a water outage, a frequent occurrence. His sister had carved out an abandoned and rundown section of the house for Mr. Blair to fix up as his own.
Termites had eaten into the window frames, and the roof was leaking. He would need to install a toilet and do the electric wiring himself.
“This is my freaking reality after I worked so hard,” he said. “What am I going to do?”
For a muscular man who speaks with great self-confidence — about his soccer skills, his intellect, his business acumen, his life transformation — Mr. Blair seemed to vacillate between lamenting his situation and embracing his circumstances.
He tried tapping into the restless energy that had rubbed off on him in New York to keep busy with his immediate needs: formally quitting the job he left behind, getting his belongings shipped to Jamaica, finding out how to obtain a local ID and dealing with a stray bull roaming the backyard.
Without a job or a car, Mr. Blair mostly languished in his sister’s home even as he expressed fear of becoming a burden to her.
As he began taking in the island — a drive by his school, a visit to the hotel kitchen where he used to toil, a stroll on the field where he pursued his soccer-playing dreams — Mr. Blair’s Jamaica seemed smaller to him.
The island also felt slightly foreign, and he felt like a foreigner in it.
Everywhere he went, whether ordering goat curry at a restaurant or asking for the price of paint at a hardware store, Mr. Blair was ever-paranoid about being slighted because he dressed or sounded more American than Jamaican.
He was preoccupied with the mug shot and fingerprints taken at the airport and how they would be used by the government. And he had no idea how he would begin a job search or how employers would reconcile his qualifications with his deportation.
“This deportation is not going to be good for his résumé,” his sister, Tamara Stewart, said. “They’re going to assume the worst.”
His prospects dimmed about a month after his arrival, when local news outlets wrote about his deportation after ICE issued a news release with his photo, publicizing his kidnapping conviction and touting his removal from the United States.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem have made it clear that we are prioritizing arresting and deporting the worst of the worst,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement.
On a recent Sunday morning, the sun seeped into the hilltop house as Mr. Blair’s nephew picked June plums from the backyard to make fresh juice. His grandmother made the bed, while his sister cooked breakfast: beef liver, cooked banana, dumplings and coffee.
They all sat to eat, next to two giant barrels awkwardly placed by the dining table. The barrels were stuffed with rice, canned beans, sacks of sugar and bottles of cooking oil — the dry goods Mr. Blair used to ship from New York to help feed his family.
Now, they were feeding him, too.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration, focused on the influx of migrants arriving in the New York region.
Todd Heisler is a Times photographer based in New York. He has been a photojournalist for more than 25 years.
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