[This is a lawer responding to question from a reader.]

Question: I came to the United States three years ago, and my wife is a naturalized citizen. My wife and I were born in the same West African country. Anytime we have an argument or misunderstanding, she threatens to call the cops on me. She also says if the cops arrest me they will hand me over to immigration to deport me. Is this true? Why should I be deported because of a misunderstanding with my wife?

Answer: It is not likely that you will be deported just for having a misunderstanding or an argument with your wife. However, if the misunderstanding leads you to injure her, you may be deported depending on the degree of the injury she sustains and how you injure her.

If you have frequent arguments and misunderstandings, you are advised to resolve your marital problems the African way. If you are a Christian, contact your pastor or any of your church elders, for mediation. If you are a Muslim, contact your Imam, or your Rabbi if you are a Jew. If you are a member of any of the traditional, ethnic African organizations, contact the president or chief and/or elders of the organization for mediation.

You do not want the police to come to your home to resolve your domestic misunderstanding, or as a result of an incidence of domestic violence.

Police Officers in New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland (California), you name it, have complete and total disregard for the lives of people of African descent. Police officers have conferred on themselves, or better yet the criminal injustice system has conferred on them, the divine right to decide whether a person of African descent they encounter in the street, a place of employment, a home, will live or die.

This sounds scary and unbelievable, incredible, unimaginable. But this is the reality. It is not pulp fiction.

For example, in the 1980s Eleanor Bumpers was senselessly shot to death by a New York City Police Officer who had responded to a domestic violence call. The police reasoned that Ms. Bumpers had threatened a man with a kitchen knife. The officer who killed her was not convicted.

Ms. Bumpers was in her eighties. She was somebody's mother. She was a grandmother, a great grandmother. She was an African American.

In the late 1990s, Anthony Baez was choked to death by an NYPD officer, when the ball he had been playing with inadvertentently struck a police vehicle. A New York State Judge let him off the hook.

It was the federal government that convicted the police officer for violating Mr. Baez's civil rights.

Mr. Baez reportedly wanted to be a police officer, but he will never achieve his American dream.

In 1999, Amadou Diallo was shot 49 times, 19 of these shots pulverizing his slender body to death. He was not doing anything other than standing in the vestibule in the Bronx apartment building where he lived. After he had been executed, the police unashamedly ransacked his apartment looking for information to discredit him—as if a discredited person deserved to be executed summarily by the police.

The police concocted a fiction that the police officers had mistaken a wallet that Amadou had been holding for a gun.

The police officers who had executed Amadou were tried in a friendly venue as the case was moved from the Bronx to Albany. Moreover, the judge who had been assigned to the case was reportedly African-American. The criminal (in) justice system did not trust that people from the Bronx and an African-American judge would be impartial in trying the white police officers who had murdered a person of African descent.

The police officers were not convicted of Amadou's murder.

Several years ago, Patrick Dorismond was murdered in cold blood by an NYPD officer when Dorismond refused to be entrapped into illegal drug or narcotic dealing. He was a person of African descent. The police officer who had committed this insane murder was not even indicted.

Mr. Rudy Guiliani, former Mayor of New York City illegally, callously and contemptuously unsealed the sealed juvenile criminal record of Dorismond, sarcastically describing him as "not an altar boy."

Mr. Guiliani should have revealed that his own father was not a patron saint either. He was a criminal.

We do not need a 1 million page Compendium of Police Brutality on People of African Descent to capture and memorialize the brutality police officers in the United States have meted out on people of African descent. They are guilty until proven innocent. Too many times the police summarily execute them before they get the chance to prove their innocence.

Just do the right thing, and do not resort to violence in a domestic dispute. If the police come to your house you would rather that you were deported. Your body could be shipped to your family back home in a body bag.

NOTE: The information presented here is general in nature and by no means a substitute for advice by an Immigration Lawyer. Readers are advised to consult with an Immigration Lawyer for their case.