Seattle activists rally around detained illegal immigrant despite criminal past

Seattle’s activist left and local media are once again teaming up to push a sympathetic narrative around an immigration case, while burying the inconvenient details. In 2003, US Citizenship and Immigration Services moved to rescind his permanent resident status, but mistakenly dropped the case after believing he was serving overseas with the Washington Army National Guard.

This week, The Seattle Times highlighted the detention of Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry, a Pakistani national and US Army veteran, who was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during what was supposed to be his citizenship interview in Tukwila. His wife, Melissa Chaudhry, a 2024 congressional candidate who ran in Washington’s 9th District on a stridently anti-Israel platform, told reporters that her husband’s case is simply another example of injustice against immigrants.

But a closer look at court records and past reporting shows there’s far more to the story.

According to court filings obtained by The Olympian, Chaudhry has a long history of fraud and deception dating back to the 1990s. In Australia, where he worked as a taxi driver, he was convicted after attempting to use another man’s passport, left in his cab as collateral, to open a bank account and obtain medical benefits. He also used a stolen credit card more than two dozen times.

KING 5 reported that Chaudhry later tried to re-enter Australia with a fraudulent passport in 2000 before entering the US on a tourist visa and settling in Yakima. Once in the United States, he married a US citizen, who petitioned for his residency. But when applying for visas, naturalization, and even jobs, including a position with the Yakima Police Department, Chaudhry falsely claimed he had no prior arrests or convictions.

Much of the sympathetic coverage hinges on Chaudhry’s time in the National Guard. Yet records show he never deployed overseas. In fact, he reported a back injury during training in 2003, before his unit was sent to Iraq. Despite this, his supporters frequently cite his veteran status to tug on public heartstrings, something rarely seen from Seattle media outlets that often dismiss or ignore service members.

Chaudhry’s wife, Melissa, has also been the subject of controversy. Her 2024 congressional campaign centered almost entirely on anti-Israel activism. She supported the violent Gaza encampment at the University of Washington. She was endorsed by some of the most openly antisemitic figures in Washington politics.

Her involvement has helped turn her husband’s case into a cause celebré among Seattle’s activist left. One of the first and loudest promoters of the story was a hardline leftist activist for Real Change, the homeless newspaper hawked outside Seattle grocery stores. Over the weekend, there were two sparsely attended rallies calling for Chaudhry’s release, one by a Marxist group.

This case follows a familiar pattern: activists and sympathetic reporters highlight an immigration arrest as a human-interest tragedy, emphasizing family hardship and leaving out or burying criminal history until deep in the article, if mentioned at all.

Chaudhry has lived in the US for more than 25 years, but his record of fraud, deception, and false statements has followed him every step of the way. He was ordered deported as far back as 2011, yet has managed to fight removal for more than a decade.

Now, after his latest detention at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, activists are once again presenting him as a victim of a cruel system. But the facts tell a different story: Chaudhry isn’t an innocent immigrant unfairly targeted. He is a convicted fraudster who repeatedly lied to US officials and has been gaming the system for nearly three decades.