21 Savage Facing Deportation After Ice Arrest

The Grammy-nominated rapper 21 , who has long been associated with Atlanta, has been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency says he is actually a U.K. citizen who overstayed his visa and that he now faces deportation.

The news has come as a surprise to fans, who assumed the rapper was from Atlanta, as he has often talked about his tough childhood in the city's Eastside. As The Atlanta Journal Constitution put it, 21 - whose real name is Sha Yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph - "has long been considered a local act."

The 26-year-old first appeared on the rap scene in 2015 and has since rocketed to success. In December, he scored his first No. 1 on the Billboard charts for his latest album, I Am > I Was.

It turns out he was a U.K. national who came to the U.S. as a child but then overstayed his visa, federal officials say. He was taken into custody Sunday morning during a "targeted operation" in metro Atlanta, ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said, as reported by the Associated Press.

In July 2005, when he was 13, Abraham-Joseph entered the U.S. legally but stayed in the country after his visa expired a year later, Cox told the AP.

The rapper was convicted of felony drug charges in 2014, Cox said. But ICE was not aware of his immigration status at the time and only learned later, an ICE official told the Journal.

Source:
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/04/691210275/atlanta-rapper-21--arrested-by-ice-for-allegedly-overstaying-visa