35 Aug 3rd–Aug 9th, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | cONTeNTs | feeDBacK | OPiNiON | NeWs | feaTuRe | NighT+Day | culTuRe | film | cafe | music | Potted Plants Dennis Mejic has lived in the U.S. since age 4. Now he’s facing deportation for growing 5 more pot plants than the law allows. BY KATYA SCHWENK F ive plants. For Dennis Mejic, that was all that stood in the way of his freedom. If he’d had 12 marijuana plants on Oct. 10, 2012, he wouldn’t be facing deportation to a country he has never known. But he didn’t. When Mejic’s home was raided by Peoria police officers that day, he had 17 pot plants. Now, the federal government is fighting to deport the 53-year-old refugee from Pancevo, Serbia — who has lived in the U.S. since he was 4 years old. Mejic’s legal battle is a case study in the lasting impacts of Maricopa County’s ruth- less pursuit of marijuana cases before voters approved medical marijuana in 2010 and recreational weed in 2020. Nearly a decade later, the federal government has refused to drop Mejic’s case. Federal agencies have claimed that his conviction on marijuana- related state charges indicated he was involved in drug trafficking. The evidence to support that argument is paper thin. “It’s kind of a mystery to me why they are so aggressively pursuing this case,” said David Asser, who is Mejic’s lawyer. Other than the marijuana charge, Mejic has a clean record. Mejic lives a simple life. He’s been a framer for decades, remodeling and constructing houses. He owns a home in Peoria and has lived in the Phoenix suburb since 1998 raising two sons and caring for his elderly mother. Yet in the eyes of immigration court, Mejic is a drug trafficker. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement wants to deport him. Mejic’s parents fled Pancevo in the early 1970s, arriving in New York in 1974 as refu- gees. Although he was born in what is now Serbia, when his family left it was part of the former Yugoslavia. Should Mejic be deported, he isn’t sure what country it would return to. It’s all difficult for him to imagine. “So where are they even going to deport me to?” Mejic said in a recent interview at his home. “It’s been emotionally straining.” The police raid It was here, at his neat, nondescript home in Peoria that he shares with his son and aging pit bull, that the nightmare began. On that Wednesday in 2012, Mejic was leaving for work at sunrise. He remembers police pulling him over a block from his home and cops swarming his car. “It was pretty intense,” he said. Officers identified Mejic’s home in the days leading up to the search as a “possible drugs/narcotics house,” according to an inci- dent report from the Peoria Police Department obtained by Phoenix New Times. Mejic said he believes that a neighbor complained about him smoking marijuana. It’s not clear from the document what led officers to Mejic’s doorstep. Mejic had a medical marijuana card and a small grow in a spare bedroom in the house. Years of “swinging hammers and construc- tion,” he said, left him with chronic shoulder pain. “I like to grow plants, to grow something and eat it,” he said. “Tomato plants, you know.” “So I thought, yeah, I’ll grow my own mari- juana. It’ll be cool. All natural,” he added. The officers obtained a search warrant for Mejic’s home by claiming to a judge that they smelled “fresh marijuana emanating from the house,” according to the police report. They also said that Mejic hadn’t put his trash bins on the curb on trash day like other neighbors, which one officer deemed “very strange.” His higher than average utility bills were also “very suspicious in nature,” the officers claimed. Yet after barging into Mejic’s home and rifling through his things, the officers found little to prove their claims that he’s a drug traf- ficker. He had 17 marijuana plants, which is five above what state law allows medical cannabis cardholders to grow. But many of them were small and not yet flowering as he was experimenting with growing different strains, Mejic told them. The officers did not find any significant amount of cash or records of sales. They found a Glock handgun that Mejic owned legally. “I’ve not sold anything,” Mejic told the offi- cers, according to the police report. He told them he occasionally gave some marijuana to a neighbor, but never for cash. “I swear I have never exchanged money or cash with my neighbor,” he told them. The Peoria officers later found the neighbor, who told them he had never bought weed from Mejic, according to the report. “I was handcuffed, released, and the house was trashed,” Mejic recalled. The cops seized his weed and county prosecutors threw the | CANNABIS | >> p 36 O’Hara Shipe Dennis Mejic at his home in Peoria.
