After ICE deported him to Italy, Arkansas man turns to Rome’s refugee relief agencies for help

[Episcopal News Service] In late February, Davide Adamo Bundy, 59 – born in Italy and reared in Arkansas – landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport carrying his belongings in a red mesh “tater” sack and with $67 in the pocket of his government-issued sweatpants.

His journey to Italy began when he was released from an Oklahoma jail after charges against him in an assault case were dropped, he was handed over to ICE and an immigration judge ordered him deported to Italy, where he had not lived since infancy. With two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers he bypassed security and boarded a domestic flight in Dallas, Texas, and then transferred at Washington Dulles International Airport for the flight to Rome. He sat between the two officers. Three in-flight movies and nine and a half sleepless hours later, he arrived in Italy.

It was not the first time Bundy had faced a deportation order. A decade earlier, a judge had ordered him deported, but this time the order was executed. He arrived in Rome on Feb. 24, 2026. He exchanged his U.S. dollars for €42 at the airport currency exchange at a 15% markup and bought a €14 ticket on the Leonardo Express to Rome’s main train station. Exhausted, he bought a slice of pizza, a soda and a bottle of vodka and sat down outside the train station.

As he sat there, a man approached him and asked him if he was OK. Bundy hadn’t had alcohol in a long time and was not OK. The man offered him €100 and, with the help of the man’s partner, guided him to a Catholic-run shelter for refugees and migrants. Still, he said, he spent his first 36 nights in Rome sleeping on a piece of cardboard, a protective layer against the cold concrete, before a bed opened up. He also found his way to the Episcopal-run Joel Nafuma Refugee Center, where he is now studying Italian and receiving additional legal and social support.

The JNRC has operated from St. Paul’s Within the Walls Episcopal Church since the 1980s. It takes a holistic approach to serving refugees and migrants, providing food and clothing, teaching them about their legal rights, preparing them for and helping them find jobs, and helping them integrate into society. Bundy’s arrival marked the first time, to the staff’s knowledge, that the refugee center has encountered a person born to an American serviceman and an Italian woman.

His is a case study, Sharon Nagliero, the JNRC’s HR and program manager, told ENS, and “interesting from a legal perspective … not only for the fact that it’s incredible; I mean, for someone who lived in and who comes from the U.S. … and finds himself in Italy in the position of asking for international protection.”

Bundy is waiting on the formalization of his international protection request, which is not guaranteed, and in the meantime, with help from lawyers and others who provided services to refugees and migrants, he is trying to locate birth records necessary to apply for Italian citizenship. He’s also trying to get the documents ICE officers presented to Italian immigration officers when he cleared the border control checkpoint at the airport.

In Italy, international protection is a legal process by which non-European Union citizens – refugees and others fleeing serious harm or who fear persecution – apply for asylum or other protections.

“Right now, he’s in administrative limbo,” Nagliero said. “And he needs to learn Italian so that he can work, and also to understand and protect himself, and it’s not easy.”

Bundy was born on Jan. 5, 1967, to an unwed couple, an Italian woman and an American serviceman stationed at an Army garrison in Vicenza during the Vietnam War. His biological father abandoned his mother. The out-of-marriage pregnancy embarrassed her family, and she was sent to a convent to give birth. After Bundy was born, his mother found work cleaning rooms in a hotel frequented by American soldiers on leave. His parents met while she was working and he was staying at the hotel.

“Dad met my mama, and he had feelings for her and said she was the finest woman he had ever seen,” Bundy said, with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes.

The man who raised him married his mother and adopted him. In 1968, when Davide was 18 months old, the Bundy family moved to Osceola, Arkansas, a delta town along the Mississippi River. At one point, he had a residency permit, or Green Card, but it eventually expired.

At 18, he joined the U.S. Navy, but with an on-base drinking age of 18 and pitchers of beer selling for $2.50, he was stopped twice for driving while intoxicated and received an other-than-honorable discharge. Then, in 1994, he was arrested with a half-pound of marijuana and convicted of a felony.

And, as he tells it, he missed two citizenship naturalization ceremonies; the first when he was young and out of town working, and the second in 2021, when he didn’t understand the naturalization paperwork and thought he was renewing his residency permit.

“What it amounts to is one misunderstanding after another,” Bundy told Episcopal News Service.

The U.S. military has maintained a strong presence in Europe since the end of World War II, with children born to local mothers and American servicemen both during and after the war. Some of these children were brought to the U.S., but not all of them became citizens, and some of them have been deported to their birth countries with no memory of having lived there or any remaining family ties there.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. immigration policy became not just an economic but a national security concern. In the decades that have followed, each presidential administration has carried out large-scale deportations. Bundy may be the first non-naturalized American-reared deportee from the United States to receive services from the JNRC, but his situation isn’t uncommon. In Frankfurt, Germany, Christ the King Episcopal Church has been serving deportees, mostly men and the occasional woman, for over 20 years.

They, like Bundy, have been convicted of felonies and/or misdemeanors, and all of them have served their time, had charges dropped or sentences vacated. It was upon their release from prison or jail that they found themselves in ICE custody and on a plane to a country where they may have been born but where they did not grow up and where they do not speak the language.

Christ the King first called its program “Heimkehrer,” which describes someone returning home, which was ironic, “because they do not feel like they are coming home,” said Laurie Reviol, Christ the King’s senior warden and a leader in what is now called “Supporting People in Transition.”

The program, which offers services to all refugees and migrants, receives support from the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe’s refugee grant program and Episcopal Relief & Development.

Frankfurt is the German hotspot for deportee arrivals from the U.S. because it has the largest airport, and there was a time when Christ the King sent volunteers to the airport to meet arrivals, Reviol told ENS.

“There’s a period of time between when a deportee lands at the airport and until they are in the German system, where they’re in limbo,” she said. “They don’t have a home, they don’t have money, they don’t speak the language. They don’t come with luggage, especially if they’re deported straight out of any kind of jail or situation like that.”

Often, people are deported because they don’t have the necessary documents or haven’t completed the process to become a U.S. citizen, though they may have served in the military or attended school in the United States. “It’s just astonishing that that kind of thing can slip through, and it’s the mistake, generally, of the parents not realizing,” she said.

Bundy didn’t realize the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father until the first time ICE picked him up and he needed a paternity test, he said. “I wasn’t counting on being a refugee,” he told ENS. “I’m at a loss for what to do… I want to go to work, I’m still capable of work.”

Throughout his adult life, he was an itinerant laborer, working on oil rigs, in power plants, a gold mine, a paper mill and on various construction projects. He spent two or three years unhoused. When he was last arrested in 2025, he was living in Section 8 housing in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in an apartment complex, he said, where fentanyl addicts and dealers hung out. He was trying to run off an addict who was menacing him and some of his female neighbors when he hit the man with the side of a machete. After he spent a month in a county jail, the charges were dropped, he said, and he was released into ICE custody and sent to a facility in Louisiana before he was deported.

“He lived all his life, except the first few months as a baby, in the U.S. He served in the Navy and cared about his neighbors back in Oklahoma who were dealing with a fentanyl dealer. And now, as he had some issues with the law, the authorities decided to deport him to a place where he doesn’t speak the language, has no existing roots, and no real way to fend for himself. This is cruel and unusual punishment,” the Rev. Jonathan Evans, priest-in-charge at St. Paul’s Within the Walls and the JNRC’s executive director, told ENS.

“For the church and our ministry of the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center, compassion and love is our response.”

-Lynette Wilson is the managing editor of Episcopal News Service.