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On the plane ride home to a place where he had never lived, Akeem Creese felt like an outcast. His thoughts came fast and furious.
“I thought about my first taste of freedom in six years and wondered how my daughter would visit me. I had US$120, and I didn’t know the exchange rate, Creese said.
He arrived in Piarco airport at 9 pm on February 28 with his belongings in a net bag, resembling a laundry bag, given to him by US immigration officers when they deported him to Trinidad.
The Trump administration has taken an aggressive approach to deport any immigrant who breaches the law or overstays their time in the US. Thousands have been deported to various countries, including members of the notorious MS-13 gang.
Two recent groups were deported from the US to TT and some of them were assisted to reintegrate in society by non-governmental group Vission on a Misson.
“I never thought I could get deported,” said Creese. “It’s not that I thought I could do whatever I wanted, but I had a permanent resident card, and when you see the word ‘permanent,’ you think the word means just that. The authorities told me that card really doesn’t mean anything. That was a shock to me. I didn’t know that the word, ‘permanent,’ could change.”
Born on May 20, 1986, Creese, was a year old when his family left Trinidad and migrated to Newark, New Jersey. His home in the US felt very Trini, but his life felt American. His parents and five siblings had Trinidadian accents; he had an American accent.
“I can’t fake an accent even if I wanted to,” said Creese.
He mostly knew about Trinidadian culture through his mom.
“My mom only had Trini friends, and my friends always asked me, “How do you understand your mother when she talks? Everything felt normal to me.”
Creese, 39, had only visited Trinidad once, when he was 13, for a wedding. He spent five days here.
“I knew my relatives in Trinidad only because they visited New Jersey,” he said.
Creese had no Trini friends in the US.
“I was a fixture in my neighbourhood. I played basketball. We had a big block party when my school won the state championship, and I got a scholarship to Keystone College. I was the first boy in my neighbourhood to go to college,” Creese said.
He went on to study culinary arts, specialising in Italian food, pasta dishes and Italian sauces and mastered Trini cuisine, roti, pelau, curried potato, channa, ponche a crème, callaloo and saltfish,
“I’m really diverse,” he said.
Gun found in apartment
In 2017, Creese held two jobs, working at a Dollar Store in the day and a Quality Foods Warehouse at night. His trouble began in 2019 on the street near Mohammed’s corner store.
“I frequent the store a lot. So do a lot of guys. Some are in crime. I know them. I don’t judge them.”
On the day, he stopped to talk and shake a few hands on the street, nothing felt out of the ordinary. Two weeks later, police raided his home searching for illegal drugs. They said someone reported they were coming to pick up cocaine. Instead, police found a gun. This didn’t worry Creese.
“I told them if you check the paper inside the bag with the gun, you’ll see a church flyer advertising a buy-back programme for illegal guns.”
The gun had a broken firing pin and couldn’t be used, but it could fetch US$200 in the buyback programme.
"Guys on the street don't fix broken guns. They get a new one. It was an easy way to make some money," said Creese.
Three months later, the gun possession charge turned into a federal charge when police checked the serial number and discovered the firearm was a stolen weapon from Virginia.
“I didn’t know the history of the gun. The police had a show-and-tell. They disclose their evidence and you give your explanation. They showed me a video of me shaking hands with a person of interest for the Feds (federal officers) and wanted me to identify the person. If I did that, my family would have been dead. Everyone knew my face and where I lived.
Creese says he took the gun charge to protect his family. Four years later, in 2023, his lawyer got a sentence of time served. On October 25, 2023, he stepped out of the federal holding cell, thinking he was going home. Immigration officers arrived at the same time, arrested Creese and took him to an immigration facility in Pennsylvania. He stayed there for 15 months fighting a case to remain in the US. On December 11, 2024, he lost the case.
“I had 30 days to appeal the deportation order. My mother wanted me to appeal. The lawyer said I had only a 30 per cent chance of winning my appeal. I had spent 16 months in immigration and was financially drained.”
[caption id="attachment_1158277" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Akeem Creese, was deported from the US. Creese said he had been living in the United States of America since he was one-year-old. - Photo by Innis Francis[/caption]
On the 30th day, he signed the deportation order. He had no passport, but Immigration had his ticket. They took him to JFK airport in New York, gave him a folder to present to Trinidad immigration and put him on a plane.
“They said Trinidad would process me, and I would be able to go to my family. In Trinidad, an official escorted me through customs, fingerprinted me and asked me for an address.” He had no exact address.
“I just knew my brother was waiting outside for me. They told me that if I couldn’t give an address, they would have to detain me until someone claimed me. Instantly, my heart dropped. I don’t know phone numbers by heart. I had no phone.
“I told them I hadn’t heard my brother’s voice in 20 years.”
The flight landed at 9 pm., and Creese was still detained at 12:30 a.m.
“I asked someone to please go outside and ask for my brother. They wrote my brother’s name on a paper and went to look for him. Luckily, he was still waiting for me. The woman came back and gave me the thumbs up. She asked me if I wanted something to eat and walked me outside.”
Then reality hit home.
Children left behind in US
“My first week here, I went through the whole ID card process and applied for a BIR number for taxes. It takes months to get these documents. I’m lucky I have family, but who wants to keep asking family for help?”
Creese experienced Carnival for the first time, playing mud mas in a J’Ouvert band. That took his mind off his culture shock and his desperate need to find work.
“I have no ideal job in mind. I’ll take anything – even a job no one wants. I have to be busy. I want to do everything I can to better myself.”
He thinks about everything he will miss in his children’s lives now.
“I have a son 13, and a daughter, almost six. I’ll never attend their graduations or my daughter’s prom.”
He speaks to his daughter on social media every day. His son’s mother has stopped communicating because she doesn’t feel the situation is good for her son.
“My girlfriend has been a backbone of support. Though she’s in America, she makes sure I feel like I’m not a failure. Not everyone is rooting for me, but I have a lot of supporters,” said Creese.
When people ask why Creese never became a US citizen, he tells them about all the money his mom spent on immigration lawyers. He was 21 when his mother became a citizen. Creese says waiting to settle into his new life is draining.
“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I don’t want to be a statistic. All I need is a chance. I know I will make the person who hires me proud, and I want my children to be proud of me. My main thing is fitting into Trinidadian culture. It's difficult having an accent. People know you're not from here."
When he went to town last week, Creese noticed someone’s strange behaviour after he spoke to a store clerk.
“I finally did something I never would have done in America. I walked up to a cop and said,
‘There’s a man following me everywhere and making me feel uncomfortable.’ The police officer walked me to a taxi.”
Some day, Creese hopes to return to the US. His deportation papers state that he is banned from reapplying for entry into the US for 10 to 20 years.
Akeem Creese feels like an American. Now, he’s learning to be a Trinidadian.
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