Imam requests bail hearing

From this morning's Houston Chronicle is a follow-up story about a jailed Houston area Imam.

Sheikh Zoubir Bouchikhi put his palm to the glass separating him from his 18-month-old daughter at a Houston immigrant detention facility and blew her kiss after kiss, his eyes brimming with tears.

The bewildered toddler touched the window as her older sister picked up a telephone handset to talk to their father for the first time since his arrest at their home three months ago.

“Baba,” said 7-year-old Bushra, using the Arabic word for Daddy. “Are you ever going to come back?”

Bouchikhi, the popular spiritual leader of a southeast Houston mosque, has been held without bail at the facility since Dec. 17. In an interview this week, the 39-year-old imam of Houston’s Abu Bakr Siddqui mosque said he planned to start a hunger strike today to protest the government’s refusal to release him on bail while he awaits a deportation hearing.

“I feel that this is an injustice,” Bouchikhi said. “It’s absolutely outrageous what they are doing, so if they don’t release me I will bring the attention of the whole world to my case.”

The imam said he has faith in the American justice system, “but I think certain government agencies are not really doing justice to themselves, let alone to me.”

Bouchikhi is a native of Algeria who came to America 11 years ago as a student. He later obtained a religious worker visa and applied for permanent residency status for himself, his wife and oldest child. Bouchikhi’s other three children are American-born citizens.

A green card petition on the imam’s behalf by the Islamic Society of Greater Houston was accepted in 2003, but revoked in 2007.

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Elliot Gershenson, president and CEO of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, wrote a letter on the imam’s behalf.

“Based on everything we know about this man he’s an honorable man, he’s a faith leader in his community,” Gershenson said. “He’s not a flight risk, and we recommended that he be able to stay with his family.”

Bouchikhi said he has written President Barack Obama about his plight.

“Criminals are being bonded, while a man of God, whose community needs him, whose wife and children need him, is being held without bond. It makes no sense,” the imam said.