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:

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