A Refugee Died After Border Patrol Left Him at a Cafe. Fear Followed.

In the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood of Buffalo, fear is in the air.

It is where the city’s Arakan Rohingya community has made a home. And it is where refugees who are in the United States legally have been rattled by the death of a man who was left by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a closed doughnut shop on a frigid winter night. His body was found on a city street five days later.

The Rohingya community, and other Buffalo residents, are upset that the man, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, was left alone, five miles from his home. He was nearly blind, had trouble walking, couldn’t understand English and was wearing thin, jail-issued footwear.

“Our worry comes from future incidents that may happen,” said Alam Bin Mohamid, co-owner of the neighborhood’s new Burmese Bangla Grocery and Halal Meat store. “If this happens once, it’s likely to happen again unless there are preventive measures.”

The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority, have faced decades of repression in Myanmar, and many community members in Buffalo first made their way to Malaysia before settling in western New York. The family of Mr. Shah Alam was among them.

Mr. Shah Alam was 56 when he was found dead in late February. The story of his death, first reported by The Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in Buffalo, has stirred outrage over the Department of Homeland Security’s treatment of immigrants and refugees.

Fatimah Abdul Roshid, Mr. Shah Alam’s widow, said that what happened to her husband had shaken the Rohingya community’s hope that they would feel safe in their new home.

“We thought we were safe here because we had papers to show somebody that this is who I am,” Ms. Abdul Roshid, wearing a traditional black niqab that left only her eyes visible, said through an interpreter, her voice catching through her tears. “But now our community is scared the way they were scared in other countries.”

One community activist estimated that about 2,000 members of the Rohingya community live in Buffalo. Most came after the Myanmar junta’s campaign of mass murder, rape and destruction in the western part of the country, carried out by the armed forces and the police from October 2016 to January 2017, when an estimated 700,000 refugees fled.

In their new home in Buffalo, the Rohingya refugees have gained access to health care and to public and religious schools. The number of Rohingya patients at the Jericho Road Community Health Center tripled between 2023 and 2025, to 1,000, according to the center, which has two clinics in Broadway-Fillmore. One in eight babies whose deliveries were handled by the health center came from a Rohingya family.

The neighborhood, which suffers from high levels of poverty and crime and was once a bastion of the Polish community, is now a home to African Americans and Bengalis as well as Rohingya people. The Rohingya, many of whom have construction skills, have moved into and are repairing dilapidated, 19th-century wood-framed cottages on streets bruised by past demolitions. Many of the homes are in the shadow of the Central Terminal, a towering former Art Deco train station that is being redeveloped.

The Rohingya neighborhood straddles Broadway, once the main commercial thoroughfare leading to Buffalo’s outer neighborhoods. The Rohingya community — with its three Rohingya-owned grocery stores and a restaurant — is adding to the street’s predominantly Bengali-owned businesses.

In their homeland, the Rohingya are systematically denied education and health care. In Buffalo, they see their new life as full of possibility, said Mohamad Rahman Imam Hussein, 31, the city’s first Rohingya real estate agent, who is active in the community. He arrived in Buffalo in January 2025, just before President Trump issued an executive order indefinitely freezing refugee resettlement in the United States. The Rohingya can learn a lot, he said, from the thousands of Bangladeshi refugees who came before them.

“They have built a blueprint. All of the communities have done that,” Mr. Imam Hussein said. “We were living like refugees in our home country. So, when we move to a new country, especially one that is well-structured like in the U.S., we have to learn everything from scratch.”

Mr. Shah Alam’s journey in western New York began on Christmas Eve in 2024, when he arrived as a refugee from Malaysia. He had gone there in 2002 to flee Myanmar’s military junta after being subjected to forced labor, and was later joined by his family. They decided to come to the United States because they couldn’t get the documents needed to become Malaysian citizens.

“A lot of our community members would say go to America, it is a place where you can thrive and be treated the same as other people,” one of Mr. Shah Alam’s sons, Mohamad Faisal Nural Amin, 23, said.

But shortly after Mr. Shah Alam arrived, he was arrested. A police report from February 2025 asserted that he had trespassed onto a woman’s property and damaged a shed door. The property owner called the police, who later said that Mr. Shah Alam had swung long poles he used as walking sticks at them. The police said a scuffle ensued, and that an officer was injured.

“I apologize for my husband’s mistake, that he got lost and ended up in a house, and that he didn’t listen to the cops, but to be fair he didn’t understand anything,” Ms. Abdul Roshid said.

Afraid that Mr. Shah Alam could be taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, given the agency’s aggressive actions across the country, the family elected to have him spend what became a year in the Erie County Holding Center. Eventually, he accepted a plea deal to a lesser charge than what he had initially faced.

Upon his release, Mr. Shah Alam was taken by Border Patrol and dropped off at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop. His son had been waiting outside the jail to take him home, while Ms. Abdul Roshid set her husband’s clothes out for him at home and prepared a meal to break the fast for the first night of Ramadan, the holiest Muslim holiday. His death on a city street, all alone, haunts them. No one had told the family that Mr. Shah Alam had been left at the doughnut shop.

“On his death bed, I couldn’t even see him, I didn’t even know where he was,” Ms. Abdul Roshid said. “And to find out he was gone without even saying goodbye breaks my heart.”

The Trump administration’s moratorium on new arrivals has put those Rohingya who were on the verge of being allowed into the country in limbo. That includes three of Ms. Abdul Roshid’s children, and her grandchildren, who remain in Malaysia. She and her other two sons who live in Buffalo are desperate to be reunited with their relatives.

Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, is investigating the circumstances surrounding Mr. Shah Alam’s Feb. 24 death and what transpired before then. A spokesman for the Buffalo Police Department said it was helping the investigation by seeking surveillance footage and witnesses.

Emails to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Buffalo field office and the Department of Homeland Security inquiring about whether the Border Patrol was investigating the handling of Mr. Shah Alam were not returned.

In an earlier emailed statement, Border Patrol officials said that their officers had offered Mr. Shah Alam a courtesy ride after he was released from the jail, and that he accepted. The officials said that they dropped him off at the Tim Hortons, which they determined to be a “warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station.”

Imran Fazal, director of the Rohingya Empowerment Community, which helps refugees with filling out paperwork, understanding bills and facilitating legal services, said that Mr. Shah Alam’s experience was a reminder of the vulnerability that people feel when they encounter language barriers. (The Rohingya speak an Indo-Aryan language.) The halt in the processing of green card applications, ordered by Mr. Trump in November for those coming from Myanmar and 18 other countries, has also deeply concerned the community.

“People are not going outside if they don’t have to, unless it’s to go to work, and some are even going to work in a group because they are scared,” Mr. Fazal said.

Mayor Sean Ryan of Buffalo, a Democrat whose first executive order as mayor in January was to ban city officials from cooperating with ICE, said that the Rohingya had been a “welcome addition to the city.”

“The tragedy of this family is they fled state violence to go to Malaysia, and came to America for the promise of safety from government violence, and look what happened,” he said.