“Villain got banished/Refused out the U.S., he ain’t even Spanish.”
These are the opening lyrics to DOOM’s 2012 collaborative track “Banished” with Jneiro Jarel, released months before what would apparently be the masked rapper’s final attempt to enter the United States. Born in the United Kingdom, the rapper otherwise known as Daniel Dumile, or MF DOOM, was denied entry to America for the first time in 2010 upon returning from an international tour, and by 2012, he seemed to have accepted the reality of life abroad. In an interview with Q magazine that year, he said it outright: “I’m done with the United States, it’s no big deal.”
DOOM passed away on October 31, 2020, though the news wasn’t made public until December. Weeks later, an official “inauguration playlist” made for the Biden-Harris White House featured one of his songs. Fans roundly criticized the inclusion, pointing to the rapper’s denial of entry to the country under the previous Democratic administration. But the details of his immigration situation, like almost everything else about him, have long been shrouded in rumor and mystery. Now a collection of previously unreported documents amassed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—acquired by Pitchfork via the Freedom of Information Act—newly reveal some portion of DOOM’s decades-long endeavor for legal status. It was a struggle that began in his infancy and was exacerbated by the complex U.S. immigration system and his occasional brushes with the law as a young man. The documents map out only a partial outline of DOOM’s life, shining light on some of the circumstances that led to his eventual rejection from the country he grew up in. (Representatives for DOOM’s estate declined to give comment for this story.)
According to his birth certificate, Dumile was born in Hounslow, a borough of West London, on July 13, 1971. (The certificate lists his birth name as Dumile Daniel Thompson, and his name appears in various other configurations in other documents, including Daniel Dumile Thompson and Dumile Thompson Dumile. This piece will refer to him as Daniel Dumile, the name most commonly used for him.) The following month, on August 27, he would journey to Long Beach, New York, using a B2 tourist visa with an expiration date of February 26, 1972. As he grew up, he would spend years in that city but also live in other locations around the state with his mother and father—immigrants from Trinidad and Zimbabwe, respectively.
Dumile’s mother filed a relative petition for her son when he was 3 years old, which is the first step for U.S. citizens and permanent residents who wish to immigrate an immediate family member to the country. Five months later, the petition was approved. Typically, the next step in the process is to file an application for permanent residency, but no such application was filed. That same year, the federal government created a record of Dumile as a “deportable alien.”
The documents also give some rare insight into the rapper and his family. In 1983, when Dumile was 11 years old, a memo from the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (a predecessor to USCIS) suggests why his parents seemingly never filed for permanent residency for him. According to notes on the document, Dumile’s mother appeared that year before an immigration case supervisor in downtown Manhattan. The supervisor advised her to file for her son’s permanent residency on his behalf. She responded that she was unable to file the requisite forms due to lack of funds.
Another set of documents contain glimpses of Dumile as a child. In an early school report card, filed to USCIS decades later as evidence of Dumile’s long term residency in the United States, his kindergarten teacher described him as “a quiet boy who gets along with his peers,” with “good ability but very poor work habits.” The teacher cited “poor attendance” as his reason for falling behind academically, but praised his creativity: “He can draw beautifully... He has ability that he is not using.”
By 1985, teenage Dumile and his younger brother Dingilizwe had saved enough money to buy their first recording equipment. They started a hip-hop group called KMD, which stood for “Kausing Much Damage,” and later “A positive Kause in a Much Damaged Society.” Dumile took on the name Zev Love X, Dingilizwe went by DJ Subroc, and a friend rounded out the trio. By the beginning of the 1990s, they’d inked a deal with Elektra Records and began working on what would become their debut album, Mr. Hood. Dumile later described this period in an interview with Wire: “Me in my mom’s crib, doing beats, cuttin’ hair for extra cash, trading records and whatnot. Fun times, you know? It was adolescence, that teenage time.”
Mr. Hood was promising enough to convince Elektra to greenlight a second album. By spring of 1993, KMD were approaching completion on the follow-up, Black Bastards. Then, on April 23, Subroc was struck by a car and killed. He was 19 years old. Dumile was devastated by the loss of his brother and bandmate, but continued to finish Black Bastards through the rest of the year. Elektra announced that the album would be released in May 1994, but soon rejected it entirely, in part due to a controversy over the album’s cover art, a Dumile illustration that depicted KMD’s “Sambo” character hanging from a noose. The label released Dumile from his contract, leaving him with the Black Bastards master tapes and no label ready to release them.
Dumile later described the period as one of “real pain.” On May 7, four days after what would have been the original release date of Black Bastards, records show that he got into an altercation in Long Island and was arrested on second-degree assault charges. “It was an argument and the other person got hurt,” Dumile would explain to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer in 2010. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, misdemeanor third-degree assault, and was made to pay a fine and restitution, in addition to serving probation.
In the mid-’90s, Dumile relocated to Georgia and began building his MF DOOM persona. He continued fending off legal charges he would later characterize as bogus. In May 1998, he was arrested by Baltimore police on multiple counts related to controlled substances, including possession of narcotics with intent to distribute. He was held for two days and the charges were dismissed a month later. “I was on a bus traveling, and the controlled substance was on the bus and nobody claimed it. And I guess I was sitting the closest,” he said to CBP in 2010. Days after the dismissal of charges, he was charged as a fugitive from justice for unknown reasons. Within two weeks, that charge, too, was dismissed.
In 1999, Dumile released Operation: Doomsday, his first full-length as MF DOOM, a wildly inventive album featuring the proper debut of the metal mask and crafty supervillain persona that would become his trademarks. The following year, as his star rose in the underground hip-hop world, he would finally secure an official release for Black Bastards. By the time he and Madlib released their opus Madvillainy on March 23, 2004, widely hailed as one of the best albums of the decade, it seemed as if DOOM’s most painful years were in his rearview.
In April 2004, while attempting to re-enter the U.S. from Toronto, Dumile went through an immigration pre-flight inspection. According to records, DOOM initially said he believed he was a citizen of the U.S., even producing a mortgage for his home in Georgia; he later described it as the moment he realized he didn’t have that legal status. In a second interview, he would state otherwise, saying that he was an English citizen and that he believed he had residency in the U.S. He was nonetheless allowed to provisionally enter the country, with a subsequent inspection deferred to a date in Atlanta the following month. He later told CBP that he went to the office on the appointed day and was told to “stay at home until I get a letter.” It’s unclear if that letter ever arrived. Government logs contain no record of results from the deferred inspection.
Still, Dumile remained proactive about sorting out his status. In September 2004, he applied for permanent residency in the United States under a section of U.S. immigration law known as registry, which offers a path to permanent residency to certain immigrants who entered the country before January 1, 1972. Having arrived in the U.S. in August 1971, Dumile believed he was eligible for permanent residency; in May 2005, he followed up, this time with the help of a lawyer, who sent the government evidence of his lifelong residency in the U.S., including the aforementioned report cards from his childhood in the mid-’70s. A letter from his lawyer to USCIS with the evidence attached read in part: “The enclosed clearly and unequivocally demonstrates that Mr. Dumile is eligible for registry and that his status should be adjusted to that of a permanent resident.”
On July 27, 2005, USCIS sent Dumile a Request for Additional Evidence. In that request, the agency sought additional evidence of his presence in the U.S. before 1972, as well as forms that he believed he’d already submitted, like his medical exam. USCIS cited “household bills, rental/lease agreements, [and] bank records” as examples of legitimate evidence—but Dumile, being an infant when he arrived, would obviously have had none of these.
In November 2005, USCIS formally denied Dumile’s permanent residency application, stating that it had never received the additional evidence requested in July. The notice stated that the decision could not be appealed, and that if Dumile wanted to file a motion to reopen or reconsider his case, he would need to submit one in writing within a month. Dumile later told CBP that he never received this denial notice, and that attempts to reach his attorney about it went unanswered.
The following month, Dumile was arrested in Austin, Texas, where he’d traveled to perform a concert at the venue La Zona Rosa. He was charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon in a prohibited place. As Dumile explained to CBP in 2010, this was a misunderstanding: “I had a weapon and a brass knuckle that was a prop, and it was in the wrong suitcase in the airport.” The rapper, who sometimes used the moniker Metal Fingers, occasionally brandished brass knuckles as part of his villain persona onstage and in photo shoots. Homeland Security records describe the offense as an “entry error in booking,” and show that he was released without prosecution.
DOOM released Born Like This, his final solo studio album, in 2009, and soon began plotting tours to support it. Returning to the U.S. from abroad in March 2010—he’d been scheduled to play shows in Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Zurich earlier that month—he was “admitted in error” under a tourist visa waiver, according to Homeland Security records. Later in the year, upon returning from another stint abroad, Dumile applied for entry under the same waiver but was questioned by CBP. You can see why Dumile might have expected he would be allowed to re-enter; after all, he was granted entry under the visa waiver months earlier without issue, and he was given no further indication at the time that his status would prove a problem.
According to the records, Dumile told a CBP officer he had no intention to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, and showed them a return ticket to the UK booked for January 19, 2011. But it didn’t matter; he was deemed inadmissible for three different reasons under U.S. immigration law. The first was that he was an immigrant without an immigrant visa. The second was that he was convicted of a “crime involving moral turpitude,” a broad description that, based on the records, seems it could only apply to the misdemeanor third-degree assault he received probation for in 1995. The third reason cited by a CBP officer is that Dumile had an “over 1 year unlawful presence” in the United States.
Kim Xavier, a senior immigration attorney at the Brooklyn-based firm CoveyLaw, explains that “unlawful presence” in the U.S. starts accruing after an undocumented individual turns 18 years old. Under the terms of immigration laws passed under the Clinton administration in 1996, any adult who accrues over one year of “unlawful presence” and then departs the United States can be barred from re-entering for 10 years, though they may apply for waivers; if they try to re-enter the country via unofficial channels, they will receive a ‘permanent’ bar and cannot re-apply as immigrants to reside in the U.S. for at least 10 years.
“It can be confusing to navigate U.S. immigration law, even for attorneys—it’s like a labyrinth, and it’s constantly changing,” Xavier says. “If the DREAM Act had been passed when it was first introduced in 2001, [Dumile] would have possibly benefited from that. But we weren’t there.”
Dumile was refused admission to the U.S. and returned to the United Kingdom. He would make another attempt at re-entering the United States via Miami in 2012, while in transit to Jamaica, but was once again denied entry via tourist waiver. This was Dumile’s last recorded attempt to pass into the U.S.
Based on the available information, Xavier notes that DOOM could have been eligible for what is colloquially known as a “D-3 waiver" for re-entry on a temporary visa. But his longtime residency here and relatively short time spent in the U.K. would have complicated his application, Xavier says—a situation she describes as “doable, but tricky.” There is also an “extreme hardship waiver” available for green card applicants subject to the 10-year bar who have a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse; however, that waiver is much more difficult to obtain. It’s difficult to know whether DOOM knew the full extent of his options, or what drove the decision not to pursue those options if he did. After a long battle with a system that seemed determined to keep him out, maybe he was tired of fighting.
When asked to comment on Dumile’s situation, a representative for CBP gave the following statement: “A person can be inadmissible to the United States for a variety of reasons. Inadmissibility is governed by Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act which can be found within Title 8 of the U.S. Code... Travelers who have been determined to be barred from entry into the United States can apply for a waiver of inadmissibility; an application for a waiver does not guarantee admission.”
On December 18, 2017, Dumile’s son, Malachi Ezekiel Dumile, passed away at age 14. Dumile grieved his loss, writing on Instagram: “Safe journey and may all our ancestors greet you with open arms. One of our greatest inspirations. Thank you for allowing us to be your parents.” Two months after DOOM died in October of last year, his wife shared the news via Instagram. “Words will never express what you and Malachi mean to me,” she wrote. “I love [you] both and adore you always.”
What we can piece together from Dumile’s immigration records is a story of one family’s difficulty, persistence, and frustration in navigating an overwrought system. It’s familiar to any immigrant who’s ever wondered about whether they will one day be forced out of or kept away from the place they call home because of obsolete laws, brushes with law enforcement, or unlucky and inequitable circumstances.
“Immigration law is a mechanical process, and our process is broken,” says Xavier, the immigration attorney. “Sometimes people get left in the shadows and live undocumented. Many of them don’t know they’re undocumented until much later in life, especially kids. But this is their home; they’re Americans. The same way DOOM gave a lot to the music and culture here, DREAMers go on to law school, they become engineers, teachers, nurses—they’re part of the fabric of our society. This is just another example of how frustrating and sad it is to not be able to overcome a situation that you did not choose.”
The USCIS documents show that Dumile knew he had to resolve his immigration status in 2004 and took meaningful steps to do so. His application for permanent residency under the registry provisions was possibly denied because he either couldn’t or didn’t prove that he was living in the U.S. prior to 1972—even though records show he arrived in the country prior to 1972.
Dumile was sometimes reticent to discuss his immigration status in interviews. When he did address it, he seemed determined not to let hardship quell his creativity. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, he expressed frustration over the “red tape, or whatever” that was keeping him out of the U.S., but also showed signs of acceptance. “We all go through things in our lives. I’m trying to promote that way of thinking,” he said. “Instead of thinking about things as happy or sad, I see them as events and experiences. You have to step back and be neutral.”
Additional reporting by Evan Minsker.
