“New York — Laith Nakli sits on his living room couch holding a book by a man he credits with saving his life. There’s an ominous image of handcuffed hands on the cover. But Nakli is hoping the tome’s title — “A Second Chance” — is a sign that US District Judge Frederic Block could”, — write on: www.cnn.com
New York —
Laith Nakli sits on his living room couch holding a book by a man he credits with saving his life. There’s an ominous image of handcuffed hands on the cover. But Nakli is hoping the tome’s title — “A Second Chance” — is a sign that US District Judge Frederic Block could save him once again.
Because Nakli isn’t supposed to be sitting in sweatpants beneath a giant portrait of Marlon Brando in his Manhattan apartment on this September afternoon. Today the 56-year-old actor should be packing his suitcase and flying to Los Angeles for a star-studded event where he would be one of the stars.
A movie he sees as the biggest film of his career is coming out. Onscreen, Nakli will be acting alongside Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.
But he won’t join Ali and other actors at the Hollywood red-carpet premiere for “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.” He’s seen the reports of ICE detaining people at airports, and flying to California feels too risky.
Months ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about making the trip. But Nakli is learning to navigate a new reality: His long-closed immigration case was reopened this year — one of nearly 150,000 cases the Trump administration has decided to send back to court since January 2025 as part of its immigration crackdown.
And now, while he promotes a film that’s garnering critical acclaim and awards buzz, Nakli is also bracing for a court date that could lead to his deportation.
Over the years he’s played a wide range of characters, from a US military sergeant to a crime boss. But the real-life drama he’s now living off-screen has no script he can follow. What’s next feels entirely unpredictable, and his case offers a revealing window into the ups, downs and uncertainties many immigrants face as they fight for a chance to say in the US.
“It’s a crazy fear that you live in,” he says. “In today’s age, anything can happen.”
But he’s hanging on to a sliver of hope.
Another ruling from Block, the federal judge who sentenced him nearly 30 years ago, could give him a chance to stay in the country, Nakli says.
The actor was born to Syrian parents in the United Kingdom and is a citizen of both countries. He came to the US from Damascus in 1990, and soon afterward began pursuing a career as a professional bodybuilder, winning the “Mr. Syria” title in 1996.
But bodybuilding, Nakli says, took him down a dangerous path.
Nakli pleaded guilty in 2000 to four counts of conspiracy to possess and distribute controlled substances — in his case, illegal steroids — charges that also eventually landed him in immigration court.
On the day of Nakli’s sentencing in federal court, Block offered words of encouragement.
“You have obviously recognized the fact that steroids are a problem and not to be countenanced, you have accepted responsibility in that respect as well and your rehabilitation has been noteworthy,” he said.
The charges carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The judge sentenced Nakli to three years’ probation, community service and a $3,000 fine.
That, Nakli says, gave him a chance to set his life on a new course. He left bodybuilding behind and threw himself into acting.
He trained at a studio in New York and eventually helped run the program, becoming a mentor to generations of young actors. If he’d stayed in bodybuilding, he says, “I probably would have died.”
Now, Nakli hopes the judge remains as reasonable and understanding as he remembers.
Earlier this year, Nakli’s attorney filed a petition in federal court asking for the earlier criminal conviction to be vacated. When Nakli pleaded guilty in 2000, the petition says, his then-lawyer didn’t advise him that the plea could carry serious immigration consequences.
“Had I known this plea carried mandatory deportation regardless of the sentence, I would never have accepted it,” Nakli writes in a sworn declaration, noting that he would have insisted on going to trial or pushed for his attorney to negotiate a plea deal for a different charge. “My life, my family, and my future were all in the United States.”
In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security accused Nakli of fraud, alleging he didn’t acknowledge the arrest in immigration paperwork. The immigration court summons also cited the drug charges, calling them “crimes of moral turpitude.”
But the government stopped its efforts to deport him and administratively closed the case two years later.
Ever since, Nakli has worried the case could be reopened. In a 2024 interview with CNN, he described the feeling as a dark cloud that follows him everywhere.
“Is the sun going to seep through it at the end? Or is it going to hail? Is it going to be a storm? You don’t know.”
In a packed movie theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, director Bassam Tariq spots Nakli in the second row.
Minutes earlier, many in the theater gasped at a pivotal point in the film for Nakli’s character. Now, Tariq invokes Nakli’s name as he’s fielding questions after this private screening of “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.”
“One of the actors from the film is here,” Tariq says. “He really is a phenomenal collaborator.”
Nakli stands, and the room erupts in applause and cheers.
At a reception afterwards, the buzz around the film is energizing. Nakli looks around at the table spread of fancy hors d’oeuvres and the throngs of people.
“I feel good,” he says. “It’s almost like I’m living in the Matrix.”
His next immigration court hearing is a month away. But at this party you’d never know it. Nakli doesn’t talk much about his immigration case; he worries it will make some people uncomfortable – or stop seeing him for who he is.
As he walks around the party, groups of strangers gleefully shout out the name of one of his most famous characters.
“Uncle Nasseem!” they say, like they’re greeting a friend they’ve known for years.
One fan, an aspiring filmmaker, asks for advice on breaking into the industry.
Nakli remembers what Quintin Tarantino once told him. Back then, Nakli owned a candle shop in Greenwich Village, where he says the famed director was a regular customer. One day Nakli summoned the courage to ask whether he had any guidance for an aspiring actor and writer.
“Don’t wait for the phone to ring. Just do it yourself,” Tarantino told him.
Decades later, Nakli is working on numerous writing projects and getting recognized by strangers for his acting work – living the future he’d barely dared to dream of.
“Make your short film. Create your own path,” Nakli tells the aspiring artist. “Don’t wait for anyone.”
Even now, decades into his acting career, Nakli is still trying to make his own path.
Since moving to New York in the 1990s, he’s driven for a car service, worked in a falafel shop, been a bouncer at a bar, opened the candle store and helped run an acting studio.
He’s friendly to strangers. He’s quick to laugh. Once, he says, he jumped onto the subway tracks with several others to help rescue a man who’d fallen.
Actors like Ramy Youssef credit Nakli with playing a key role in their careers.
“The way Laith has helped me is the way he helps everyone he meets … Making introductions, lending people money, housing someone in between places — Laith is that kind of person,” Youssef wrote in a letter several years ago supporting Nakli’s application for a presidential pardon.
Nakli couldn’t be more different from many of the characters he’s known for playing.
On “Ramy,” Nakli plays a relative of Youssef’s character: Uncle Nasseem, described by critics as “bigoted, violent” and “unbearably boorish.”
And in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” he plays Mike Mahmoudi, a crime boss who leaves threatening voicemails and travels with an entourage of armed goons.
But even in deeply flawed characters, Nakli makes a point of finding their humanity.
“There’s something about Mike who, he just wants to belong to something important. … That’s why his men are like his children,” Nakli said at a recent Q&A session on the film. The character, he told the audience, has a profound “sense of loneliness.”
“It is deep. And I’ll speak for myself, as an immigrant…I understand that on levels that are very extreme – the loneliness of wanting to belong. To this very day, every day is a fight for me to belong.”
A few years ago, Nakli played an immigration lawyer in the film “Problemista.” He told CNN at the time that he’d modeled his portrayal on the hapless attorneys he’d encountered over the years while facing his own immigration challenges. In the movie, the character muses that a motto for his law firm should simply be “We’ll see.”
But the man leading the charge in Nakli’s real-life immigration case has a decidedly more proactive approach.
Kam Perez knows firsthand how significant Nakli’s contributions have been on stage and screen. He’s also an actor, and they’re close friends. They met at the acting studio back when Nakli was helping run it and Perez was taking acting classes — and working as a prosecutor for ICE.
“Laith is actually a huge part of the reason I left ICE,” Perez says.
Getting to know Nakli, he says, helped him see how even cases treated with nuance in the criminal justice system are often unjustly categorized with much more serious charges in immigration court.
In an April 2025 memo, a branch of the Justice Department criticized administrative closure of immigration cases, arguing the practice had become a “de facto amnesty program unauthorized by Congress” that was “an unmitigated disaster from a policy standpoint and strongly appears to have been unlawful.”
The memo, Perez argues, kicked off a campaign to reopen thousands of cases, including Nakli’s.
Asked why Nakli’s case was included, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson didn’t provide a specific reason but noted the actor had been paroled into the country in 1998 to face prosecution. “All his claims will be heard by an immigration judge.”
But Perez is hoping that convincing Block to vacate the conviction will give them grounds to dismiss the case in immigration court. Nakli has more than served his time, he says.
“Even if there wasn’t very strong evidence for vacating the conviction just as a matter of human decency,” Perez says, “the fact that he served these 15 years living in terror should be enough.”
But a few weeks before his next hearing in immigration court, Nakli gets devastating news.
Block has denied his petition, finding that Nakli hasn’t satisfied the legal requirements, that vacating the drug conviction wouldn’t help Nakli’s immigration case and that Nakli had been warned in court that he could face deportation.
Perez says the legal battle isn’t over. He’s filed a motion for the judge to reconsider.
But the stakes in Nakli’s October immigration court hearing just got even higher.
People keep asking Nakli if he needs anything.
On an evening at the end of October, he’s working on the set of an Apple TV show in New York. And he’s having a blast.
This, Nakli thinks, is exactly what he needs right now: a day of doing the work he loves. But tomorrow, he fears, will be a different story.
“I’m on set being treated like royalty,” he writes in a text, “and tomorrow I will have cement on my belly. The irony.”
In a matter of hours, Nakli will be in immigration court for the first time since his case was administratively closed in 2013.
He knows New York’s 26 Federal Plaza well. The building houses other Department of Homeland Security offices in addition to the courtrooms where immigrants fight deportation.
And Nakli has gone there every year for more than a decade to renew the temporary green card stamp in his passport that allows him to work legally in the United States.
Every time he walks through the door, a feeling of dread hits him. On one side of the building’s entrance, he sees the well-dressed and smiling people heading to citizenship ceremonies. On the other, he sees the solemn crowds waiting for court hearings with terrified looks on their faces.
Nakli once described the scene in a one-man show: “The lines are for Heaven and Hell,” he said. “But in order to get to Heaven, you have to go through Hell.”
Nakli’s been trying to stay positive this week. The recent film release has reminded him of the career and community he’s built. He knows whatever happens in immigration court won’t change that. But Block’s recent ruling against him was a blow. So was the Trump administration’s decision in July to reject his application for clemency along with some 6,000 other pardon requests.
Nakli’s attorney has told him this October hearing should just be a procedural step as his case continues. But still, Nakli has a sinking feeling this trip into Hell won’t go his way.
Last week, when he went there to get the stamp in his passport, officials said they couldn’t give it to him because of the pending immigration hearing.
A few days ago, Nakli had a nightmare.
A DHS officer he’d met when he tried to get a passport stamp was arresting him after his hearing. The officer had been friendly, and seemed excited to learn Nakli was an actor in a new movie.
But in his dream, one officer’s kindness couldn’t save him from a deportation order.
Now it’s morning, and Nakli looks like he’s seen a ghost as he walks through his living room. His immigration hearing is hours away.
He pulls a blazer out of the closet and puts it on. Then he hands two pill bottles to his girlfriend, Marissa Ruben, and asks her to hold onto them, just in case. He’ll need his medications if he’s detained.
Ruben tucks Nakli’s medicine into a tote bag she designed with a crest representing their relationship — their names are fused together, and the word for kisses is printed in Arabic and Hebrew.
They hold hands as they walk to the subway, heading downtown to 26 Fed.
Flipping through paperwork from the bench in Courtroom 23 on a Friday morning at the end of October, Immigration Judge Anna C. Little looks frazzled. She tells Perez she hasn’t had a chance to review the stack of filings he recently submitted to the court.
In the documents, Perez argues that Nakli’s immigration case should be dismissed, and that if he is deported to Syria, he would likely face persecution because of the roles he’s played.
“He would be returned to Syria as a prominent, Western-identified media figure whose public performances have directly challenged the Islamic and political tenets enforced by the de facto authorities,” Perez says.
There are more than 50 cases on Little’s docket this morning — a caseload so packed that a clerk says there’s only room for lawyers to enter the courtroom. Nakli and dozens of others sit in the adjoining waiting room, straining to hear what’s happening.
A voice blaring from a speaker in the neighboring courtroom isn’t helping matters. “‘Marathon Man’ is a very interesting movie — with Dustin Hoffman,” a man says.
Nakli hears the booming voice in Courtroom 22 now discussing “The Sopranos.” He’s tempted to chime in and mention he was once in an episode of the beloved HBO show. Instead, he moves closer to the courtroom door and tries to make out what the judge in his case is saying.
In Courtroom 23, Little says she wants to hold an individual hearing to allow more time for both sides to make their case.
“I’m going to give you a control date, counsel,” she says. “December 23, 2027.”
Nakli feels his heart sink. He crouches against a wall of the waiting room with tears in his eyes as he processes the news.
Ruben sees him panicking. She tries to reassure him that his next hearing isn’t until next year.
Nakli doesn’t believe her.
“She said December 23-27,” he says, convinced the judge announced a time window just a few months away.
Outside the courtroom, Perez and Nakli embrace in the hallway as the attorney confirms the placeholder court date they’ve been given is, in fact, in 2027.
“I heard one thing, and I heard it wrong,” Nakli laughs.
They now have more than a year to prepare their immigration court case and keep pressing in federal court, too.
Nakli races to the USCIS office on another floor. This time, with proof of his next court hearing, he’s given the passport stamp he needs.
For Nakli, it’s a huge relief.
“We have time to fight now,” he says.
But Ruben says she isn’t satisfied. To her, it doesn’t feel like the win Nakli deserves.
She wants the judge to see the Nakli she knows: the man she met on a movie set and fell in love with, a person who rebuilt his life into something beautiful.
“We got good news today,” she says. “But it’s just good news for now … This is not justice.”
But Nakli feels hopeful.
Back in his apartment, he starts spreading the news.
“It was a small victory, but a good one,” he tells a friend on the phone. Then he changes the subject. “Tell me, how was your callback?”
It’s time to return to doing the work he loves — mentoring fellow actors and preparing for his next projects.
In his living room, the massive Marlon Brando portrait has been replaced by a large poster featuring Nakli and other actors from “Ramy.”
And a poster signed by the cast of “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is propped up against the wall, ready to hang.