On Tuesday, April 3, Concordia College premiered the documentary “Chosen Home,” produced by Prairie Public Broadcasting, which tells the story of how various immigrants came to live in the Fargo-Moorhead area.
After the 30 minute film played in Barry Auditorium, there was a panel discussion featuring two of the immigrants who appeared in the film, Siham Amedy and Cani Adan. Also present on the panel was previous Concordia graduate Sam Garcia and associate professor of Spanish Fanny Roncal Ramírez.
Present in the audience were several more of the immigrants who were featured in the documentary.
“It’s important to storytell, to humanize,” says Amedy, whose family left the Kurdistan region of Syria when she was six. “People are not numbers.”
The documentary featured interviews with people from a range of backgrounds, from Kurdistan to Somalia to Ireland. Some were displaced due to war or extremist groups, while others left to be with family or loved ones.
“I would emphasize that the experience of the immigrant is diverse. So diverse,” says Ramírez.
Cani Adan came to the United States in 2015 to escape an extremist group in Somalia that threatened his life. After arriving, he spent six days in a detention center where he was subjected to sleep deprivation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Adan was questioned throughout the night about his identity.
“When you sleep. After one hour, they say, wake up. What’s your name? My name is Cani. I can’t change that, right? And after one hour again, go back to sleep. What is your mother’s name? I can’t miss that right? Then after three times, you know, I’m like, should I sleep? Or what’s going on?” says Adan.
Afterwards, Adan was sent to and spent an additional 40 days in the Batavia detention center in New York. The detention center is currently under some scrutiny from a local investigative news organization, the Investigative Post, for abuse against detainees there.
A recent inspection by the Office of Detention Oversight (ODO) stated that in late October 2024, the office reviewed three records of excessive use of force at the center.
The report states that “staff initiated immediate uses of force on detainees who were no immediate threat to themselves or others,” and “did not take the time to assess the possibility of resolving the situation without resorting to force before they deployed chemical agents, entered the rooms, and forcibly removed the detainees.”
Adan describes his time there as a “tough experience.”
“You know, you are coming from a threat and still going to another threat. I never thought I’d be out,” says Adan.
After he was released, Adan made his way to Moorhead to meet with a cousin and he began work as a custodian at Moorhead Public Schools.
Today, he is the executive director of a nonprofit organization called New Roots Midwest, which works to help immigrant integration in Minnesota and North Dakota.
Adan made it into the U.S. roughly a year before Donald Trump was elected in 2016, amidst his campaigning on anti-immigration rhetoric and promising to “build the wall,” and shut down the U.S.-Mexico border.
Adan says he feels sorry for immigrants like him that tried to come to the U.S. after President Trump won his first election.
“ I feel sorry for a lot of people,” he says. “No one is here for fun.”
He expressed his love for the diversity of America. Where he is originally from, Hudur, Somalia, people are much more homogenous than in the U.S.
“People look like me, all Muslims, and there’s no difference,” says Adan.
Today, though, Adan and many more fear that diversity is under threat from restrictions on immigration.
In March, the Trump administration began drafting a list of 43 countries to ban travel from. This decision echoes his controversial alleged “Muslim ban” from his first term in 2018.
The 2018 ban barred applications for travel vias from the Muslim majority nations of Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In addition, North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials were banned as well.
Among the possible new list of banned countries is Somalia, where Adan escaped just 10 years ago, and whose government became destabilized in 1990, when Adan was born.
“This is not the America that I dreamed of. That we all dreamed of,” he says.
The documentary “Chosen Home” is scheduled to air on Prairie Public Television on April 28 at 8 p.m.
