Mother Jones illustration; Dominic Gwinn/AFP/Getty; Courtesy Cecelia Lizotte
It was Father’s Day, and Suya Joint, a celebrated West African restaurant in Boston, was slammed.
Normally, Cecelia Lizotte, the restaurant’s owner and chef, would call her brother, Paul Dama, if she were in a pinch. Lizotte and Dama balanced each other out: Lizotte was the chatty boss who wore chunky jewelry and bright colors, the outgoing face of a restaurant that was a James Beard Award semifinalist last year, while Dama was Suya Joint’s quiet, attentive manager. It was Dama who picked up ingredients from New York, fixed the ticket machines and plumbing, and cracked jokes in the kitchen when things felt tense. Dama also worked as the house manager at a residential facility for elderly people with developmental disabilities, and the work came naturally to him—he had a way of putting people at ease.
“When I see him coming through the door,” Lizotte said recently, “I feel really, really safe.”
“I felt like someone just sucked my blood, my air,” she said. “Like, how do you live?”
But Lizotte couldn’t call her brother to pitch in on Father’s Day. That morning, on his way to church, Dama had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
When Lizotte got the call from Dama saying he was in custody, “I felt like someone just sucked my blood, my air,” she said. “Like, how do you live?”
Dama came to the United States from Nigeria in 2019 on a visitor visa and applied for asylum the following spring. Records show he had a Social Security number and a work authorization valid until 2029. But according to ICE spokesperson James Covington, Dama had been living in the United States illegally ever since 2019, when he “violated the terms of his lawful admission.”
There was an eerie familiarity to Dama’s detention. Dama fled Nigeria because he was kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2018. Then, too, armed men had pulled him over. Then, too, Lizotte had received a terrifying call—this one from her sister, saying that the militant group had taken their brother captive. At the time, Dama was a crime reporter working for the Nigerian Television Authority; his captors, who told him they had targeted him because of his work, made him vow to give up journalism in Nigeria if he were released. For four hellish days, Dama was beaten while his family scrambled to generate the $13,000 ransom, selling most of their property.
After his release, police advised Dama to leave the country because they could not guarantee his safety, according to his asylum application. “That is why I am here in the US,” Dama wrote, “where I feel safe and my freedom guaranteed.”
Lizotte used to feel the same way. She’d experienced the American dream herself: She’d become a citizen, a business owner, a mother of American children. Now, that idealism has soured.
“Literally right now as we speak,” Lizotte told me, “I just feel like, here’s another second kidnapping.”
Lizotte and I first met at Suya Joint in early July, two weeks after Dama had been detained. The restaurant has a relaxed, inviting feel, with Nigerian prints lining yellow walls and Afrobeats on the speakers. But Lizotte seemed to be running on adrenaline, speaking almost breathlessly. Talking with a reporter seemed like one more item on an endless to-do list.
And in a way, it was. Dama had a joint asylum and bond hearing in a few days, and preparing for it had become something of a full-time job. Lizotte had spent the weeks since Dama’s detention finding an attorney, collecting character statements, and gathering the necessary paperwork. She had to be there for her daughters, who were distraught—Paul was like a father to them; and for her staff, who were spooked; and for her family in Nigeria, who wanted constant updates. She kept her phone glued to her in case Dama, who was being held at a correctional facility in Dover, New Hampshire, happened to call.
“I did not include my brother being picked up by ICE in my whole entire business plan,” Lizotte said.
She was also raising money for the quickly accruing costs: $13,000 in attorney’s fees for the asylum case, $3,000 for the bond hearing, roughly $200 each week for Dama’s phone calls and basic needs in detention, not to mention all the costs that Dama would normally pay, but couldn’t—his rent, his phone bill, his car insurance. And, of course, there was the cost of losing a key employee at the restaurant.
“I did not include my brother being picked up by ICE in my whole entire business plan,” Lizotte said.
As the fees added up, Lizotte asked for help in an unusually transparent statement on the restaurant’s website. “Dear Suya Joint Family, I’m writing to you today with a heavy heart to share that we are facing an incredibly difficult moment at Suya Joint. My brother and our beloved manager, Paul, was recently detained by ICE while on his way to church.” While the restaurant wasn’t closing at the moment, Lizotte wrote, she was being forced to “seriously consider” what was best for the team and her family.
Support poured in. Within two weeks of Dama’s detention, a GoFundMe for his legal expenses had generated $32,000. Colleagues, friends, and family members wrote character statements. Agnes Hodges, an 84-year-old woman whom Dama helped around the house, wrote, “Who would take care of me the way Paul does?” Massachusetts state Sen. Liz Miranda wrote in, as did Rep. David Morales of Rhode Island, where the restaurant has a second location.
Dama’s detention even caught the attention of Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who had been to Suya Joint and reached out to ask what her office could do to help. “Rather than being met with the compassion he deserves, ICE has ripped Paul from his home,” Pressley wrote in a statement to Mother Jones, noting his “immensely meaningful” contributions to the community.
In jail, Dama has become the go-to guy for detainees who didn’t have family on the outside fighting for them, sharing his lawyer’s name and reading up on immigration law. But he also sounded cold, tired, and hungry.
Even after a successful crowdfunding campaign, Lizotte knew that her brother’s asylum case wouldn’t be easy. Late last year, Dama was charged twice with misdemeanors for operating a vehicle under the influence. On both occasions, he had allegedly pulled over and was sleeping in a stopped car. At the time, he was in a dark place, grieving the sudden loss of his mother; he told his family that he’d pulled over to sober up. Court records show that the charges were continued without a finding: If Dama completed a yearlong probation through December 2025, paid a fine, and finished a program for impaired drivers, the charges could be dismissed. Lizotte says the incidents served as a jolt to Dama, who decided to go to therapy.
The charges also made him far more vulnerable to immigration enforcement. They fall under a category of offenses that are not criminal convictions, but are treated as such within the immigration system. Under previous administrations, someone like Dama would have been a “low or non-priority for enforcement,” says Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, but “this is an administration who’s choosing to apply the law in the harshest way possible.”
In addition, Dama’s status as an asylum seeker no longer affords him the protections it once did. Until recently, immigration enforcement rarely detained asylum seekers who posed no public safety threat. But under Trump, asylum seekers who have been living in the country for years are targets. “They’re putting into detention people who have valid work authorization, who followed the rules and applied for asylum and are just waiting for their court date,” Gupta says. “It’s a way for them to say, ‘We arrested someone, we hit the arrest goal, and we threw somebody in immigration detention who’s not a citizen.’”
Over the phone from the detention center, Dama sometimes sounded to Lizotte like his usual calm, thoughtful self. He had become the go-to guy for detainees who didn’t have family on the outside fighting for them, sharing his lawyer’s name and reading up on immigration law. They had even given him a new nickname: “president.”
But Dama also sounded cold, tired, and hungry. Sometimes, dinner consisted of two pieces of bread. He and other detainees took to saving their food from breakfast and lunch and eating it with dinner—that way, they felt more full.
Lizotte’s daughter, Vanessa, a 19-year-old college student who works at Suya Joint on the weekends, said she usually tells her uncle everything. But lately, talking to him on the phone, she struggled with what to say.
When we spoke after the hearing, Lizotte’s breathless tone was gone, replaced by exhaustion.
“How am I supposed to talk to this man about my day and tell him about all the things I’m doing when I’m just feeling so guilty?” she said. Should she tell him, she wondered, about the day before, when she and her mom had gone to Fenway Park for a Nigerian cultural night? Should she tell him she’d gotten to go on the field and hug the Red Sox mascot? Should she tell him how excited she was?
“These are dreams coming true,” she told me. “And I feel so bad saying these things—like, he’s telling me about the food that he’s eating, how people are just being taken in the middle of the night.”
A few days after the July hearing, Lizotte and I spoke again. Her breathless tone was gone, replaced by exhaustion.
Immigration Judge Yul-mi Cho had denied Dama’s bond, and his asylum hearing was pushed back to September. Dama remains at the correctional facility in New Hampshire.
“I’m just getting more and more defeated,” Lizotte said. “Very, very much getting sick—mentally, emotionally. There’s just a void.”
Lizotte used to eat full meals at her restaurant, but lately, she’s lost her appetite. She cries easily. She wakes in the middle of the night to make sure she hasn’t missed important calls. She’s terrified her brother will be transferred to a facility further away.
Every now and again, Lizotte catches her customers’ sympathetic glances. They ask how she’s holding up.
The reality is that sometimes she wants to give up. Close down the restaurant, go back to Nigeria. Her daughters and employees don’t like her to talk like this. They’re holding onto her, they say, and they need her to stay strong.
“And I’m like, ‘Okay, I understand that. Where’s my brother?’” she said recently. “Like, who am I holding on to?”
But occasionally, she’s able to cling to hope of her brother’s release. During a recent phone call with Dama, another detainee—a new friend of Dama’s—asked to talk to Lizotte. The friend, an African DJ who had been living in Maine before he was picked up by ICE, had an important message. If he and Dama got out, he wanted to DJ an event at Suya Joint. It would be a three-day party—Friday, Saturday, Sunday. They’d call the celebration Freedom.