Feds Order Beloved Teacher Deported

Feb. 20, 2005 -- -- Obain Attouoman is a Boston special education teacher who is beloved by his students, respected by his peers and valued by school administrators, but federal immigration authorities have ordered him deported.

Attouoman, a native of Ivory Coast who has taught in the Boston public schools for more than a decade, missed a hearing with a judge on his application for political asylum in June 2001, because he says he misread the handwritten date on the notice he received.

After more than three years of trying to get a new hearing, he has been ordered to leave the country by March 4. He was originally ordered to leave by Feb. 11, but after hundreds of students, parents and fellow teachers demonstrated outside the Boston office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb. 9, he was granted a three-week reprieve.

Immigration officials said the reprieve was to allow Attouoman and his lawyers to try to find a country other than Ivory Coast, where he believes his life would be in danger, that would allow him to enter.

"I made that mistake by misreading that date. We all make mistakes," he said. "All I was asking for was that the court date be rescheduled. You have to give everybody a chance to be heard before you make that determination, to send a person back to a country at war, where his life is in danger."

Attouoman fears that if he returns to Ivory Coast he will be thrown in prison. He comes from a family of political activists and had been imprisoned in his native country twice in 1990 for his involvement in a teachers union and in an opposition political party, he said.

Aside from the mix-up over the date on the hearing notice, Attouoman has never been in any trouble since he first started coming to the United States in 1985, his lawyer said. And at the demonstration, his students spoke about the kind of impact he has had since he began teaching some of Boston's most troubled ninth-graders at Fenway High School.

"We love him and we need him at Fenway," student Antoinetta Kelly said. "If he is gone, then a part of me is gone as well."

That demonstration was the second time his students and co-workers took to the streets to help him. After Attouoman was arrested in November 2003 on an outstanding immigration warrant and detained for four months, hundreds of his current and former students marched in his support.