Ibrahim Parlak is a Kurd who was born in a small farming village in southeast Turkey in 1962. As a minority ethnic and religious group, Kurds have historically been subjected to vicious discrimination, oppression and violence by the Turks. As a high school student, Ibrahim was imprisoned for three months in a military prison in Turkey for participating in humanitarian activities designed to help his people. After his release, he left Turkey to continue his education in Germany.

Seven years later, he became involved with the Kurdish separatist movement, known as the PKK. He re-entered Turkey and wound up in a PKK firefight with Turkish soldiers in which two Turks were killed. Ibrahim was later captured by the Turks. He was tortured and threatened in heinous ways. After he revealed the location of a hidden cache of PKK weapons, he was released, but he was now seen as an enemy by both the Turkish government and the PKK.

Ibrahim then managed to escape Turkey and enter the United States in 1991. He applied for and was granted asylum in Chicago. Ibrahim became a model immigrant. He settled in a small town in southwestern Michigan, opened a highly successful restaurant, married, became a much-respected member of his community, had an American-born daughter (who is now in college), and applied for naturalization in 1998. As Ibrahim has observed, America provided him "with the opportunity to become someone." America is a place where "if you live by the rules and work hard, ... dreams can come true."

It is a heart-warming story.

Not quite. The events of 9/11 changed everything. Because the United States had designated the PKK a terrorist organization in 1997 -- six years after Ibrahim had come to the United States -- the Bush administration denied his naturalization petition and initiated deportation proceedings against him.

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