Here was Charles Barkley Saying Charles Barkley Things:
The way some of these other immigrants are getting treated in our country right now is a travesty and a disgrace. … I think what’s going on in our country — what we’re doing to some of these amazing immigrants, is really unfortunate and it’s really sad.
Barkley says a lot of things, but when he’s right, he’s right.
This was part of a March Madness NCAA basketball broadcast on CBS, in response to a short inspirational profile of Connecticut student athlete and future NBA star Alex Karaban, whose parents immigrated to the United States in the ’90s as refugees from Belarus and Ukraine. Karaban had the assist for the last-second shot that led the Huskies past Duke in the men’s quarterfinals (which I mention here because, again, Duke lost).
The profile of Karaban and his family presented them as model immigrants and an American success story. In his full comments, Sir Charles regrettably used that framing to accept some imagined distinction between the Good Immigrants and the Bad Ones — a framing that can be as misleading and destructive as the supposed distinction between the Deserving Poor and the Truly Needy.
Here was Barkley’s full comment on CBS:
I love that kid and his family, but the way some of these other immigrants are being treated in our country right now is a travesty and a disgrace. I think there’s a difference between amazing immigrants and criminal immigrants. And I think what’s going on in our country, what we’re doing to some of these amazing immigrants is really unfortunate and it’s really sad. That’s a great immigrant story. We have a lot of great immigrant stories out there, their stories need to be told, but some of the stuff that’s happening to immigrants in our country right now is really unfortunate and it’s really unfair. But immigrants built this country and we should admire them and respect them.
I appreciate that Barkley’s passing concession to the idea of a category of unworthy, dangerous, “criminal immigrants” serves here as inoculation — a minor granting of a lesser point to make skeptics more receptive to his main point. And his main point is undeniably correct. The stuff that’s happening to immigrants in our country right now is really unfortunate and it is really unfair.
Which is to say it is unjust — unrighteous, immoral, wicked, sinful. Evil.
And all that evil stuff is happening to immigrants because millions of Americans have been willing to pretend to believe that all immigrants, or most immigrants, or even just a large number of immigrants are the Bad Ones — “criminal immigrants” who, by definition, somehow therefore deserve to be hunted, detained without due process, mistreated, and then shipped off to whatever third country might be thuggish or desperate enough to accept them.
Maybe, as Barkley seems to assume, some of those millions of Americans who cheered for the candidate waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs can be persuaded by catering to their biases with that distinction between “amazing immigrants” and “criminal” non-persons. Maybe we can help some of them to save face and then to about-face by flattering them with the reassurance that we know they didn’t mean for all this to happen to the Good Immigrants, but only to the Bad Ones. Maybe we can peel off some of those who have previously endorsed the ethnic cleansing by flattering them with the reassurance that “Yes, of course you were right to support the mass deportation of all the Tony Montanas, but of course you’re still a good person and you — being such a good person — you, personally, surely never meant to suggest that every non-white immigrant was Scarface.”
But I suspect that allowing for — and reinforcing — this distinction between Good Ones and Bad Ones is ultimately more damaging than whatever marginal gains it might promise in terms of slightly increased opposition to the current blood-and-soil nativism, inhumanity, destruction of community, human rights abuses, and contemptuous disregard for the Constitution.
Consider the recent case of one “criminal immigrant,” and how this wicked construct of the category of “criminal immigrant” resulted in cruel injustice and death.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam managed, against great odds, to come to America as a refugee. Shah Alam was Rohingya, an ethnic and religious minority group that is horrifically oppressed by the military dictatorship in Burma. He fled that oppression and lived as a refugee in Malaysia for 10 years before he was screened and vetted and approved to come to America as one of the very few refugees this country accepts. When he arrived here on Christmas Eve, 2024, he was 55 years old, legally blind, and understood only one language, Rohingya.
Six weeks later he was arrested, beaten, and jailed. Nurul Amin Shah Alam would spend a little over a year in jail before he was finally released. The next day, he was found dead on the street in Buffalo, New York.
Shah Alam’s death was reported as another example of the callous cruelty and incompetence of the militarized Border Patrol and ICE agencies, because it is that. But it’s also an example of the callous cruelty and thuggery of “normal” police departments. And of an America where the vile distinction between “amazing immigrants” and “[inherently suspect, immutably sub-human] criminal immigrants” is mistaken for something real and true.
Buffalo police arrested a blind man who did not understand English for “trespassing.”
Body camera footage from the Feb. 15, 2025 arrest, obtained by a local publication shows Buffalo police responding to a trespassing complaint on Buffalo’s Tonawanda Street. Officers are seen confronting Shah Alam, who is holding two slender black poles. Police repeatedly order him to drop the poles. When he does not comply, officers deploy Tasers and tackle him to the ground. During the struggle, police said Shah Alam bit an officer, leading to a second-degree felony charge.
The black “poles” were curtain rods that the blind man used as canes, which should have been obvious to the officers who saw him using them to navigate as he walked, but everything about his arrest suggests that those officers would have demanded that he drop his “weapon” even if he had somehow managed to acquire an Official Blind Person’s Official White Cane. His failure to comply with orders he could not understand barked at him by hostile strangers he could not see was deemed a criminal act, and so he was jailed for both “trespassing” and for “resisting arrest.”
So this man who had fled a country where he had been beaten and imprisoned by military police for no reason encountered America’s militarized police who beat and imprisoned him for no reason.
The small Rohingya community in Buffalo learned of his arrest and managed, eventually, to get him a translator who could explain to him what had happened to him. And then they were able to get him a lawyer and, eventually, to get him released.
But Shah Alam — a legal immigrant who came here as a refugee, following all the rules and jumping through all the hoops that America requires the tiny number of refugees we accept to jump through — had now been classified as one of those nasty, dangerous “criminal immigrants.” And so the Buffalo Police did not release him to his lawyer or to his family or to anyone who knew him or knew of him in Buffalo. Instead, they turned him over to Customs and Border Patrol.
That was an absurd thing to do. CBP has nothing to do with refugees. They are, by definition, here legally. They have been escorted across the border legally and officially and welcomed into America with the full knowledge and support of the federal government. That has nothing to do with customs and nothing to do with the patrolling of borders and nothing to do with immigration and customs enforcement. CBP has no role here. Nor does ICE. Refugees are literally none of their business.
If the Buffalo PD wanted to hand Shah Alam off to some other agency, they shouldn’t have called CBP, they should have called CWS — Church World Service. Or HIAS. Or World Relief. But instead they handed him over, for no reason, to Customs and Border Patrol. They did this in February 2026 — after seeing what that agency had done to Renee Good and to Alex Pretti.
CBP apparently was happy to take him — until they realized that he was a refugee, here legally, and beyond their reach. Their mass-deportation agenda intends to get around to every non-white refugee eventually, but at this stage that would involve too much paperwork and judge-shopping, and all of that would have taken more time than their ethnic-cleansing quotas allowed for a single deportation.
And so the CBP agents dumped Nurul Amin Shah Alam on the street at 9 pm, miles from his home, outside of a Tim Horton’s that had closed an hour before. It was night time in winter in Buffalo and the blind man had no coat and no shoes and spoke no English. He was apparently suffering from a bleeding ulcer and was in need of medical care.
He was found dead on the street the following day. The Erie County Medical Examiner’s office attributes his death to “complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration.”
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me …
Send them to us so that we can accost them, tase them, beat them, imprison them, and then abandon them on the frozen street to die of hypothermia.
That is what it means to accept the vicious lie that there is some category of “criminal immigrants” that we should fear and prosecute and persecute. That false category and false distinction is, I think, another of those “pedagogies of moral accommodation” that train decent people to accept and endorse monstrosity.
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