Legal Fight Continues for Quasim

Dear Community,

Thank you for the love and support you have given to our family in this process. As we continue a long legal fight to ensure our foster son and beloved brother, Quasim Yar Mohammed, does not get deported to Afghanistan, we are asking for your help again. We need to raise $15,000 over the next month to hire a new immigration lawyer to take his case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and retain his criminal lawyer to pursue a pardon request.

Background on Quasim and our family:

Quasim arrived in the U.S. as a child refugee in 2004. There are no words to describe the unspeakable, horrible traumas he survived. He and his older brother, Azeem, lost their parents when their home was bombed. Quasim was just age 4 at the time. Having no other anchors, the brothers escaped to Pakistan and while in a refugee camp there, they connected with the Lutheran Community Services who sponsored them to immigrate to the U.S.

Our mother was their teacher when she met them and they were twelve and fifteen. The boys were in an abusive foster family, and were living in fear. Their foster family never cooked for them or took them to buy food. Our mom quickly intervened and the rest is history; they became part of our family.

Quasim has severe PTSD, Mood Disregulation with possibly Bi-Polar, Major Depressive Disorder, and Cognitive disability. He struggled in school where he faced a lot of racist profiling and criminalizing at a young age. He acted out, got in trouble a lot, and eventually developed addictive behavior with alcohol.

Quasim was incarcerated for about 5 years for several criminal felony offenses related to a domestic violence situation and in that time his green card expired. When his sentence ended, he was detained by ICE. He has been at the Northwest Detention Center since 2019 facing deportation to Afghanistan.

We miss Quasim terribly and want him to come home. We have secure housing lined up, a job for him, mental health services, and family who will care for him. He is our son, our brother, and we love him very much. He deserves to be home with his family, rebuilding his life and continuing to heal.

Our legal fight over the last year:

If Quasim is deported to Afghanistan it’s nothing short of a death sentence. Quasim doesn’t speak the language or have any family there who can help him. He has a complex medical profile including being HIV positive and he would not be able to access the daily life saving medication he needs to survive. His American identity and his mental health conditions makes him a likely target for violence and torture. We’ve been doing everything we can to fight the deportation, but we are in an arduous uphill battle.

In the winter of 2020, Quasim was assigned a wonderful immigration lawyer that was paid by the State, but despite having a strong case and powerful witness testimonies, the immigration judge ruled to deny Quasim’s asylum case and proceed with deporting him. We were heartbroken and are still in shock that this was the ruling.

Since then we have started a lengthy appeal process. We also used all the remaining funds from the first gofundme a year ago to retain a criminal defense lawyer to pursue Post-Conviction Relief (PCR). This is one of the best possible ways for us to argue his immigration case by negotiating a new plea deal for his criminal offenses. We’ve had some promising developments with this approach and we are presently very hopeful. We could not have done this without your support!

With Quasim being immunocompromised, we are also very concerned about his health and safety regarding COVID. We’ve submitted a request to have him released because of his medical vulnerability but ICE denied our request. We will not give up and will keep trying!  

We need to raise $15,000 in the next month!

We are gearing up for the next level of the appeal process and now that the Post-Conviction Relief is moving ahead, our timeline is speeding up. We need to raise funds to retain a new immigration lawyer to file an appeal at the Ninth Circuit which will cost $10,500. Our lawyer until now has been great -- he's super committed and hard working (we highly recommend Devin at Open Sky Law) but having a new lawyer opens up some legal options that we need to take advantage of, so alas here we are and Devin is connecting us with someone he trusts so we are in good hands. It is also likely that we will pursue a pardon request which also requires retaining Quasim's criminal lawyer which costs $7,500. All the money raised by this fundraiser will go directly to Quasim’s legal defense and anything raised above that will go to helping Quasim transition when he is released.

Thank you for your support and giving what you can in this challenging time.

With enormous gratitude,

Josée Perez (Quasim’s forever mom), Azeem Yar Mohammed (Quasim’s brother) and Yasmeen and Dalya Perez (Quasim’s foster siblings)


Below is a picture of our family a couple years after Quasim (back row, right) and Azeem joined our family:


 Below are photos of our friends and family who gathered out in front of the NW Detention Center to hold vigil during Quasim's hearing in July 2020 just before we got the devastating news that the court ruled against him: