Blind Rohingya Refugee Dies After ICE Release Leaves Him 5 Miles From Home

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who was nearly blind and spoke no English, was found dead on a Buffalo street on 25 February 2026, six days after US Border Patrol agents dropped him at a doughnut shop five miles from his home and notified no one.

Shah Alam had spent 13 months inside the Erie County Holding Centre after a misunderstanding with police led to his arrest in February 2025. He was released on bail on 19 February 2026, following a plea deal that his attorney said was specifically structured to prevent ICE from detaining him.

Instead of being returned to his family, he was collected by US Border Patrol agents and left alone, almost entirely without sight, unable to read or speak English, and carrying no means of navigation, at a Tim Hortons coffee shop near an address where his family no longer lived.

His body was found by Buffalo police officers on the first block of Perry Street, just after 20:30 on Tuesday 24 February. Buffalo City Hall spokesperson Ian Ott confirmed to Investigative Post that Shah Alam was identified by the Erie County Medical Examiner, with the cause of death determined as health-related, ruling out exposure and homicide.

A Year in Custody After a Walk Gone Wrong

Shah Alam and his family arrived in Buffalo in December 2024 as Rohingya refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine State, a region from which more than 750,000 people were driven out in a military campaign that the United Nations described as bearing the hallmarks of genocide.

The Rohingya are considered the world's largest stateless population, denied citizenship by Myanmar since 1982 and described by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as 'the most persecuted minority in the world.'

According to his attorney Benjamin Macaluso of the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo, Shah Alam ventured out on his first walk since arriving, in February 2025. He is completely blind in one eye and has only blurry vision for several feet in the other.

In need of a walking stick, he found his way to a shop and bought a curtain rod. He walked his Black Rock neighbourhood until the weather turned colder and, confused, ended up on the porch of a woman who was letting her dog out.

'He comes from a place where people don't keep dogs,' Macaluso told Investigative Post. When officers arrived and ordered Shah Alam to drop his curtain rod, he could neither see nor understand them. Two officers Tasered and then tackled him. Shah Alam was charged with assault, trespassing, and possession of a weapon: the curtain rod. Officers found his refugee identification card and contacted ICE, which promptly issued an immigration detainer on him.

His family did not bail him out for over a year, Macaluso explained, fearing that if he were released into ICE custody, he could be transferred to a federal detention facility out of state. Staying in the Erie County Holding Centre at least meant they could visit him.

In early February 2026, the Erie County District Attorney's office offered a plea deal that Macaluso said allowed Shah Alam to 'clear' the detainer. His guilty plea to trespassing and possession of a weapon was the gateway to freedom. ICE agreed not to detain him. Shah Alam posted bail and walked out of the Holding Centre on 19 February into the hands of Border Patrol agents who had been notified of his release by the Erie County Sheriff's Office.

The Drop-Off — and Six Days of Searching in Freezing Temperatures

Border Patrol agents collected Shah Alam from the Holding Centre at 16:39 on 19 February, according to Macaluso. He said he expected his client to be transported to the ICE detention centre in Batavia, New York, the standard procedure, where he would then be released.

Instead, agents held Shah Alam for approximately four hours at the Border Patrol station in the Town of Tonawanda before driving him, at around 20:00, to a Tim Hortons on Niagara Street in the Black Rock neighbourhood.

The coffee shop is approximately a mile from Shah Alam's old address. His family, however, had since moved to the Broadway-Fillmore neighbourhood on the other side of the city, roughly five miles away.

Border Patrol notified neither Macaluso nor the family of the drop-off. In a statement to Investigative Post after Shah Alam's death was confirmed, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said agents offered Shah Alam 'a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address.'

Macaluso spent Friday in Batavia trying to locate his client at the ICE detention facility, where agents confirmed Shah Alam had never arrived. He then spent the weekend driving around Buffalo, checking shelters, motels, hospitals, and convenience stores, before filing a missing persons report with Buffalo police on Sunday 22 February.

Official Responses, Family Grief, and Congressional Outcry

Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan, a Democrat, issued a statement on 26 February calling Shah Alam's death preventable. The Erie County District Attorney's office separately confirmed it had expected Shah Alam to remain in custody pending his formal sentencing, which was scheduled for the following month.

Shah Alam's son Mohamad Faisal told Reuters that his father had only wanted to 'eat home-cooked food' and 'be united with the rest of my family.' Faisal said the arrest a year earlier was a straightforward misunderstanding; his father could not comprehend police commands to drop his walking stick.

His death comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration's intensified immigration enforcement. Immigration detainers, the formal ICE request that first placed Shah Alam in a legal limbo he spent 13 months trying to navigate, have been issued at a significantly higher rate since January 2025.

The detainer on Shah Alam was eventually cleared through his plea deal. The irony, as his attorney noted, is that the system ultimately worked as designed, ICE declined to detain him. What it did not account for was the gap between release and arrival home, which became, for Shah Alam, unsurvivable.

Shah Alam is survived by his wife and two sons. He had been in the United States for 14 months.

He survived genocide, displacement, statelessness, a year in a county jail, and a charge brought over a curtain rod, only to die in an American city, five miles from the family he was finally supposed to reach.