标签： Asia

On the morning of July 31, 25-year-old Zena Saifo walked alongside her 65-year-old father, Syrian immigrant Iemad Saifo, into a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, for what they assumed would be a routine check-in. Iemad had followed all requirements of his ongoing immigration case, working closely with his legal team for years to navigate the system, and he had no reason to anticipate that the appointment would end in custody. The family was aware of widespread immigrant detentions across the country, but they never expected Iemad – a longstanding small business owner with a wife and four children who all hold U.S. citizenship – to be taken into custody that day.

After waiting more than an hour past his scheduled 8 a.m. check-in, an agent asked Iemad if he carried any daily medication with him. The question sent a jolt of alarm through Zena. “That’s when I kind of started to question – is he going to be detained?” she recounted in an interview with Middle East Eye. Minutes later, Iemad was escorted to a private back room with his lawyer. When the attorney emerged alone to confirm ICE had placed Iemad in detention, Zena’s request to say a final goodbye to her father was flatly denied. “I just felt like my whole world had stopped. My heart dropped to my stomach,” she said.

Iemad’s journey to the United States began in 2002, when he entered the country on a B-1/B-2 business and tourism visa. He went on to put down deep roots in New Jersey, opening the popular Zena’s American Mediterranean Cuisine in Collingswood and launching other local small businesses. For two decades, his family has pursued legal pathways to secure permanent residency for Iemad, but his immigration history remains tangled. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records show his visa expired in May 2002, an immigration judge ordered his removal in 2010, and his case was reopened months later before being administratively closed in February 2023. He also has a decade-old non-violent criminal conviction for witness tampering, for which he completed five years’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and paid all required fines and restitution, alongside past arrests for theft by deception and identity impersonation that did not result in additional convictions. DHS labels Iemad a “criminal illegal alien”, but his family rejects that framing, noting he has complied with all immigration requirements for years and been a contributing member of his local community.

Zena Saifo described her father as “a pillar of our family and our community”, arguing that his 10-year-old non-violent offense did not justify tearing their family apart. “My father did what was asked of him and since then has focused on his family, his restaurant and our community,” she said. Following his detention, Iemad, who spent 14 days in ICE custody before being granted release on bond August 15, pushed back on the government’s description of his status, explaining he had been waiting for a permanent residency interview through his U.S. citizen family members. “I am pending, I am compliant, and I’m waiting for my interview,” he said after his release.

Iemad’s account of his time in detention paints a stark picture of poor conditions and dehumanizing treatment. He told reporters he was handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, with his hands chained to his waist during transport, where he and other detainees waited more than 30 hours to be processed. “A human line, but a person doesn’t feel like a human. There was no humanity in the treatment,” he said. He went nearly two days without sleep in overcrowded holding rooms where contagious illnesses spread rapidly, and he struggled to access his regular prescription medication after one of his drugs was never logged into the detention center’s computer system. Requests to see a doctor went unanswered for days, he said, and by the time of his release, he was physically exhausted and severely weakened. Zena said her father lost 15 pounds during his two weeks in custody, and a pre-existing vocal cord condition worsened significantly after he missed critical doses of his medication. After returning home, he spent nearly a week sleeping and recovering from the ordeal.

For Zena and her family, the uncertainty of not knowing how Iemad was faring during detention was one of the hardest parts of the experience. Acting on guidance from Iemad’s legal team that strong community support would boost their case for bond, Zena organized a community letter-writing event to gather testimonials vouching for Iemad’s character. The response far exceeded their expectations: more than 150 community members submitted notarized letters of support, thousands of people signed a petition backing Iemad’s release, and local elected officials and community organizations added their endorsements. Fiona Powell, Iemad’s attorney, confirmed that the overwhelming community support was a key factor in the judge’s decision to grant bond, with the judge specifically citing Iemad’s deep community ties in his ruling. For Zena, the outpouring of support was a reminder the family was not fighting alone. “I don’t think we expected to get over 150 letters of support. It was really amazing to see,” she said.

Iemad’s detention comes amid a sharp expansion of ICE enforcement operations across the United States under the second Trump administration. Data shared with the University of California Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project shows ICE arrested 49,571 people in July 2025 – the highest monthly arrest total of the current administration, marking a 15% increase from June and a 70% jump from February 2025. The growth in arrests has been driven by an increase in detentions during routine, low-stakes interactions with immigration authorities – including scheduled check-in appointments like Iemad’s, traffic stops, and worksite checks – rather than high-profile public raids. This shift has sparked widespread anxiety among immigrant communities, where many previously viewed routine check-ins as low-risk. The data also shows that more than half of all people arrested by ICE in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges, contradicting the administration’s claims that enforcement efforts prioritize public safety by targeting people with criminal records.

The Trump administration and DHS have defended the expanded crackdown as a necessary measure to enforce existing U.S. immigration law, reiterating that ICE prioritizes the arrest of people with criminal histories. In a statement addressing Iemad’s detention, a DHS spokesperson said, “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, ICE is targeting the worst of the worst. Nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the US.”

Even though Iemad is now home with his family, the fear generated by his detention has not faded. His immigration case remains pending, and Zena says she continues to worry that he could be taken into custody again at any time. “The anxiety, the fear, the immense stress experienced the past two weeks, it’s not just something that goes away,” she said. While the family is deeply grateful for the community support that secured Iemad’s release, the experience has reshaped Zena’s understanding of how immigration policy impacts entire communities, not just individual detainees. “Her father’s detention, she said, showed that the consequences of an immigration crackdown can extend far beyond the person taken into custody, affecting families, friends and communities who are left to navigate the uncertainty with them,” she said. “It really just shows we have a responsibility to the communities around us. We were able to ensure that we’re standing up for others and that we don’t let any harm go without being addressed.”

In the weeks leading up to the death of Jason Arday, a prominent Cambridge University sociologist of race and education earlier this month, a widespread media and online campaign painted him as a serial plagiarist and a fabulist who invented large swathes of his personal and professional backstory. But new in-depth analysis from Middle East Eye (MEE) has upended many of the most damaging claims at the center of the attacks, revealing a far more nuanced picture that contradicts the pervasive negative narrative that circulated before his death.

Most critically, MEE’s review of Arday’s body of work finds that the label of “serial and unrepentant plagiarist” applied to him by critics does not hold up to close examination. To date, no accredited academic institution has found Arday guilty of intentional plagiarism, despite the flurry of public allegations that have dominated coverage of the scholar. Across 33 peer-reviewed papers Arday published throughout his career, only two – approximately 6% of his total output – have required formal corrections to address attribution gaps. The overwhelming majority of his research, which centered on racial equity in education, has never faced formal plagiarism charges.

The bulk of the original accusations against Arday originated from a 2024 blog post by Nathan Cofnas, a proponent of the controversial “race science” school of thought and a former Cambridge academic currently employed by Ghent University. Cofnas claimed that after removing work that was allegedly plagiarized or not written by Arday, “there is essentially nothing resembling real scholarship” left of his career. But this assessment has been vigorously pushed back against by leading scholars in Arday’s field.

Yale University philosopher Jason Stanley argued last week that Arday’s academic impact matches that of top-tier researchers in his discipline. Noting that Arday published four single-authored papers in 2018, just years after completing his PhD, Stanley pointed out that the four works have accumulated 238, 184, 177, and 47 citations respectively on Google Scholar. “This is very impressive impact for a scholar right out of their PhD. A surprisingly large percentage of academic papers receive no citations at all,” Stanley explained, adding that Arday’s work played a meaningful role in the expanding field of race in education research.

Cofnas built his case against Arday almost entirely on results from Copyleaks, an AI text detection tool that flags textual overlap between works. But experts and institutional guidelines note that AI detection of overlap does not itself prove plagiarism, which is defined by the intentional use of another scholar’s work without proper attribution, a determination that can only be made through formal institutional academic processes.

Much of the public scrutiny of Arday’s work focused on his 2015 PhD thesis, completed at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). The university launched a formal investigation into plagiarism claims earlier this year, and issued its final ruling in March clearing Arday of misconduct. Investigators concluded that the minor citation issues identified in the thesis stemmed from “honest and reasonable error,” and that the total textual overlap with existing work fell “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time.” LJMU also noted that Arday’s supervisory team had been depleted during his PhD, leaving him with only one formal supervision meeting throughout the entire program.

The Telegraph later reported that it had found 188 sentences in Arday’s thesis identical or nearly identical to work in a 2009 thesis by scholar Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, most appearing in the literature review section. But MEE’s independent review of Arday’s thesis found that he extensively cited and acknowledged Zwozdiak-Myers’s work throughout other sections of the document, explicitly noting that his core framework of reflective practice for student teachers drew directly from her existing research. Under LJMU’s academic misconduct policy, intentionality is a required element for a finding of plagiarism, a factor that was central to the university’s clearing of Arday. Even after Arday’s death, LJMU reaffirmed in a statement that his PhD “still stands.”

Of the two peer-reviewed papers that required corrections, MEE’s review aligns with institutional findings that gaps were accidental. A 2018 paper published in the journal *Social Sciences* was amended in 2023 to add missing citations for work adapted from a 2016 study by scholar Anjum Memon. The journal noted that the original paper already acknowledged adapting Memon’s research, but “inadvertently omitted overlap between the two publications in prior sections,” a gap the author voluntarily corrected. A 2021 paper by Arday was similarly amended to add two missing references.

Journalist Peter Jukes, co-founder of Byline Times, summed up the findings of independent academic reviews: “We’ve worked with academics comparing the 3% of the texts of two papers (of the 33 Arday had peer reviewed) and they confirm the university assessment – citation failures and data handling errors, corrected.” In an interview with The Times just weeks before his death, Arday himself acknowledged early career gaps that he attributed to limited resources early in his career, noting that after 2021, he was able to afford a professional proofreader, leading to marked improvements in the accuracy of his work.

Beyond academic plagiarism claims, Arday faced widespread mockery online and in the press for alleged fabrications of his personal backstory – claims that MEE has also confirmed are largely unfounded. The most widely derided claim was that Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days for charity in 2010. MEE verified that contemporaneous coverage in multiple local newspapers, on-the-record witness testimony, Arday’s own contemporary blog posts, and dozens of event photos all confirm the challenge was completed, with no evidence of fabrication. Arday’s claim to have played semi-professional football was also dismissed by critics, but records confirm he played for two clubs, Walton and Hersham FC and Lewisham Borough FC. While Arday claimed to have played for Crystal Palace’s under-18 team, the club has stated it does not hold records from the 1990s and early 2000s, when Arday would have played, leaving the claim unconfirmed rather than disproven.

Critics also ridiculed Arday’s claim to have helped raise £5 million for charity over his career, but Arday always clarified the total was raised collectively across dozens of fundraising initiatives over 20 years, not by him alone. Byline Times found that Arday’s publicly documented charity work puts the collective £5 million figure well within the realm of plausibility. Even the claim that Arday falsely attributed a forthcoming book to himself is unfounded: the book *Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse* is listed as an upcoming title with publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and has simply not yet been released.

While some open questions remain about small details of Arday’s work and background, and a number of academics have called for a full posthumous review of his research, the broader narrative of serial misconduct and fabrication that circulated before his death has been largely debunked. This case also highlights broader systemic issues in how academic institutions handle public plagiarism allegations, according to a senior anonymous Cambridge academic who spoke to MEE.

“Universities shouldn’t be safe spaces for plagiarism, and if we hold our students to the highest standards we have to apply those standards to ourselves,” the senior academic said. “But calling someone a plagiarist is not a very helpful way of measuring the severity of what has been alleged… The case of Professor Arday has revealed huge problems with the process, some of which were already known from public reporting of other cases: it takes far too long and the university struggles to balance the need for confidentiality with the fact that an allegation is in the public domain.”

Cambridge University initially declined to investigate Arday, citing LJMU’s clearing of him from wrongdoing, but opened a probe in early August “following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments,” with no mention of plagiarism in the official statement. Shortly after the probe was announced, Arday resigned, explicitly stressing that his resignation “should not be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.” He died less than a month later.

Notably, the primary accuser Nathan Cofnas, who has argued that Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” without affirmative action, was suspended by Ghent University last week pending a disciplinary investigation into his recent controversial public statements. Cofnas has claimed he is being made a “scapegoat” for his views. Following Arday’s death, Cambridge Chancellor Lord Chris Smith labeled the campaign against Arday a “racist feeding frenzy.”

In the wake of his passing, dozens of former colleagues, students, and collaborators have shared tributes highlighting Arday’s mentorship and commitment to advancing equity in education. Oxford academic Dr. Rebecca Syed Sheriff described Arday as “kind, wise, warm, fun… He always had good ideas, always genuinely interested in the experiences of young people who would not usually be seen in research.” University of Glasgow professor Melanie Ramdarshan Bold added, “I learned so much from him: from his scholarship, which was brilliant and edifying, but just as much from the way he approached the world and other people.”

For many former students, Arday’s impact extended far beyond academic research. Sophie, a former BTEC student who experienced homelessness while studying with Arday when he worked as a college lecturer, shared that Arday supported her through daily check-ins, helped her secure food and housing, and connected her to a career in sports coaching that she held for 11 years before earning her degree. “Jason was my teacher and my football coach but most of all Jason checked in on me almost every day, he made sure I had somewhere to sleep and eat, he made me feel I belonged and that I could succeed no matter the circumstances,” she said.

As the academic community processes Arday’s death and the controversies that preceded it, the case has sparked broader conversations about due process for academics facing public accusations, the limitations of AI detection tools for determining plagiarism, and the outsized influence of bad-faith actors with ideological agendas in shaping media narratives about scholars of race.