Paramjit Singh arrived in the United States with a green card over 30 years ago, hungry to build a family and his own empire of gas stations in Indiana. Now, he’s in a county jail in Kentucky going blind from a rapidly advancing brain tumor, separated from his family and any advanced medical care. He’s been there for almost two months.
“Last thing I heard from him was, ‘I think I’m just going to give up. I’m never getting out of here,’” his niece, Kirandeep Kaur, told The Intercept. She calls him almost every day, but she said he doesn’t talk much anymore. He’s lost over 20 pounds, his family said, and he fears he will die in detention.
The government’s argument to deport Singh appears to be built on sloppy research. The Department of Homeland Security misclassified him, his lawyer argues, as “subject to removal,” dug up his 25-year-old theft conviction, and, when an immigration judge found that Singh had done his time, pointed to a forgery case — which doesn’t seem to exist.
Singh represents one example in a growing trend of legal, document-bearing immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s weaponized deportation system — and he’s one of the rare few relatively well-positioned to fight it. His gas stations gave him a lucrative business portfolio: sixteen of them, plus a distribution center and an oil-supplying truck company, which earn him a yearly income in the hundreds of thousands. So when an immigration judge found that he should be released on a $10,000 bond on August 25, his family was able to post it.But the Trump administration is using a dated mechanism called an automatic stay to override his immigration judge’s decisions, keep him locked up, and push for deportation.
His removal proceeding is scheduled for Monday, September 29.
“Paramjit Singh, a criminal illegal alien from history with a previous conviction for larceny, is being held in ICE custody,” wrote DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin in a statement to The Intercept. McLaughlin did not respond when asked to clarify if she was referring to Singh’s past theft conviction, DHS’s claim that he had a forgery conviction, or an additional criminal allegation.
Singh’s family has tried and failed to have him released on humanitarian grounds, to treat his growing brain tumor. In response to queries about his condition, McLaughlin said:“This is the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
Paramjit Singh at home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2024. Photo: Kirandeep Kaur and Gurkirat Singh
The last time Singh entered the United States, his tumor was under control, and he didn’t expect to have any issues at the port of entry. He had been in and out of the country on yearly trips to India throughoutthe three decades he’s held a lawful permanent resident green card. He was returning from one such visit on July 30, when he was pulled into an immigration room at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The grounds for his detention were laid out in smudged black ink on a “Notice to Appear” document: a 25-year-old Class D felony for theft on three counts. Singh was found guilty in 2000 for using a collect call payphone to speak to relatives in India without paying for it, and he was sentenced to 10 days probation with a year and a half in jail suspended. He’d completed his term decades ago.The notice to appear acknowledged Singh was a green card holder, but it classified him as “admitted to the United States but subject to removal,” citing his felony theft charge. It called him “an alien who has been convicted of, or who admits having committed … a crime involving moral turpitude (other than a purely political offense) or an attempt or conspiracy to commit such a crime.”
Luis Angeles, Singh’s immigration attorney, said the government was using “legal and unethical tactics at every turn.” The theft case wasn’t an aggravated felony, Angeles said, so it should not have affected Singh’s immigration status.
“My client already paid his debt to society,” Angeles told The Intercept. “And he has never committed any other crimes.”
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Singh spent five days at the airport. Then ICE called and told his family that he’d been transferred to the Clay County Detention Center in Indiana. They were hopeful it was just a misunderstanding — but then communication was cut off, and the family was unaware of where he was moved. They eventually tracked him down at Kenton County Detention Center in Kentucky. A month later, a $3,000 medical bill arrived from an ER in Chicago.
Singh has a kind of brain tumor called a pituitary adenoma, which is non-cancerous but causes hormonal imbalances. He’d had it operated on in 2021, but now it was back, causing progressive vision loss — and, compounding with other heart conditions, placing him at risk for heart failure and sudden cardiac death.
Singh’s family was unaware of any medical care in the jail that could help. Kaur tried to find out by calling jail staff and local officials — but she said she was met with empty promises and dismissiveness.
Kenton County Jailer Marc Fields and Clay County’s ICE officials did not reply to a request for comment.
The family applied with the ICE Chicago field office for humanitarian parole, which can be used to grant people temporary status in the U.S. under emergency conditions — though the practice has been severely curtailed under the Trump administration. They filed support letters from Singh’s employees, family, friends, and business partners to attest that he was not dangerous or a flight risk. Singh’s doctor wrote that his conditions “were not compatible with prolonged confinement, and his ongoing care cannot be appropriately managed in a custodial setting.”
A deportation officer at the Chicago field office told the family they were reviewing the case, then eventually stopped replying to emails.
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The family’s next recourse was a bond hearing. They hoped an immigration judge would see an upstanding figure in his community with a rapidly worsening brain tumor and understand that he wasn’t a flight risk.The judge did, ordering him to be released on a $10,000 bond.
“We saw the happiness on his face when the judge granted him a bond,” said Kaur, who’d been able to see her uncle via iPad. “His eyes were wide open.”
It was a rare victory: Only 31 percent of cases heard during the first nine months of 2023 received bond, according to the most recent data available from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The higher the bond, the harder it is for a person to get out of detention. The median bond in 2023 was $7,000, which isn’t easy to come by in a short amount of time for many people.
But Singh’s family was ready to pay. Before they could, though, government lawyers filed an automatic stay — which kept Singh locked up.
“When we called him later in the evening telling him that, hey, DHS, put a hold on it, he broke into tears,” Kaur said.
Automatic stays allow DHS to effectively ignore immigration court orders — and their use is becoming a pattern, said Suchita Mathur, senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council.
“It basically says, when an immigration judge has found that you’re not a danger or a fight risk and that you’re eligible for bond, and yet, the agency that’s prosecuting you has the unilateral authority to file a one-page piece of paper and keep you in detention,” Mathur said. “It was intended to be used in really extreme cases, and instead, ICE is using it just everywhere.”
Once the stay is invoked, the order to release gets put on hold until the Board of Immigration Appeals resolves it. That can take months.
A private investigation firm found no forgery conviction in Singh’s name. The Illinois State Police said their records “failed to reveal any criminal conviction.”
After the automatic stay, DHS filed an appeal and issued the September 29 date for preliminary removal proceedings.
The government is arguing in its appeal that Singh shouldn’t be eligible for a bond because of another purported conviction on his record, this time for forgery in Illinois in 2008.
The lawyer representing DHS did not provide any documentation to substantiate the claim, nor a case number or evena jurisdiction. Singh’s family had never heard of such a case — and Singh had never lived in Illinois. They scrambled to get answers.
The family hired a private investigation firm, which found no record of a 2008 criminal forgery conviction in Singh’s name across all jurisdictions in Illinois. The firm’s representatives went to Kenton and Clay County officials, and said the local officials had “suggested” a recent larceny conviction could have triggered Singh’s detention — but the officials didn’t have any documentation of larceny charges against him, either.
The Illinois State Police sent the private investigators a statement, reviewed by The Intercept, saying their records “failed to reveal any criminal conviction record for the subject.”
McLaughlin made clear that Singh, an entrepreneur and a fixture of the Fort Wayne community, was, in the eyes of the DHS, an “illegal alien.”
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“Politicians and activists can cry wolf all they want, but it won’t deter this administration from keeping these criminals and lawbreakers off American streets—and now thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, we will have plenty of bed space to do so,” she wrote, referring to the sprawling federal spending package Donald Trump signed on July 4. “If illegal aliens don’t want to end up in detention, they should use the CBP Home app to receive $1,000 and a free flight home.”
Angeles, Singh’s lawyer, has filed a motion to allow Singh’s release on bond to go forward on the grounds that the government hasn’t provided proof of his forgery conviction.
Time is running out for Singh and his family. They hope to prevail in the upcoming removal proceedings. But in a county jail overcrowded with ICE detainees, Singh is afraid he won’t live much longer.
Kaur recalled that her father, Singh’s brother, warned him not to leave the United States to visit India because of the shaky immigration situation under Trump. But Singh didn’t think he was the type of person who would be targeted.
“They’re just holding people who’re not giving anything to this country, who’re being wrong to this country, people who are a flight risk, people who are harming others,” Kaur recalled her uncle saying before his flight. “I’ve built my house in this country, and I’m planning to live here forever. They’re not going to do anything to me. I’m a person of this country.”
The post He Has a Green Card and a Brain Tumor. DHS Wants to Deport Him for Forgery With No Proof. appeared first on The Intercept.
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