Last year, Cheshire High School chemistry teacher Susan Chasen had a breakthrough with a student named Rihan. A refugee from Afghanistan, Rihan and his family came to the U.S. in 2024. In a class like chemistry he was working double time — to master English and learn the structure of a hydrogen atom.
One day, as she walked around the classroom, Chasen noticed Rihan’s hand in the air. It was the first time he had asked for help.
“I was so excited that he raised his hand, and then I went over and he kind of pointed to something on his paper,” Chasen recalled. Rihan said a few words in English, Chasen explained the problem back to him and he nodded his head. When he wrote down the correct answer, “it was a really pivotal moment for us.”
But as his fellow seniors were enjoying a week of spring break on April 6, Rihan was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and taken to a Massachusetts detention center where he has been held since.
The detainment was marked the second time that ICE had come for his family. His father, a translator for U.S. armed forces, was also detained by ICE in October 2025, only to be released four months later. On Monday, a judge ruled that Rihan could be released on $1,500 bond — a ruling DHS did not oppose — and declined to rule on his immigration status.
His attorney, Lauren Cundick Petersen, said in a statement that the ruling is “the right result.” Petersen has argued that Rihan’s detention was based on an administrative error.
Long before these episodes of detainment, Rihan was making an impression on his teachers. Quiet and studious, they regarded him as a remarkably resilient and hard-working pupil.
Chasen met him on his first day at Cheshire High School.
“In the beginning, it felt like the communication was really tough for him, but I could tell that he was trying so hard — not just to learn the chemistry, but also to learn what it’s like to be a high school student in Connecticut,” Chasen remembered. He had to learn what it meant when the bell rang, how to get from class to class and where to line up in the cafeteria.
But as the year went on, she watched Rihan become more confident in his language skills. “He was really appreciative of all the help that I was giving him,” she said. “He was just always polite, always sincere, always focused and really grateful for the learning that happened here and any time people spent kind of helping him out with things.”
Amy Russell, an English as a Second Language teacher, has also been struck by the gratitude that Rihan has shown for the work that Cheshire High School teachers have put into his education.
“He’s clearly deeply appreciative of this opportunity and wants to make the most of his education by working his hardest,” she said.
After the judge’s ruling on Monday, Petersen thanked Rihan’s school in a statement saying, “he’ll be back to school, where he should be, very soon.”
Gov. Ned Lamont praised Rihan in a statement for the desire shared by advocates of wanting to become a cardiologist:
“Connecticut is lucky you have you, and I have no doubt that one day, should you continue on your path to becoming a physician, patients will be lucky to have you too — steady hands, a bright mind, and a heart that already knows what it means to suffer and to persevere. Keep going. Your community is behind you, your future is waiting, and the best chapters of your story are still ahead.”
At Cheshire High School, seniors like Rihan are riding those exhilarating final moments until graduation. They’re picking out prom dresses, playing Varsity baseball and making plans for the senior picnic at Holiday Hill.
Rihan has been more focused on his schoolwork, his teachers said, like the DNA model and cell cycle flip book he recently made in biology. In English, his class is reading act two of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, and in art, he’s been making collages and working on watercolor technique.
Last year, Russell was helping Rihan with his literature class. They were talking about how you can understand your environment better by something you smell. Rihan shared the smell of home.
“He can tell his mom is making biryani rice, which is something he really likes — a favorite food,” Russell recalled. “That’s a smell he associates with home and good things.”
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
