CHICAGO -- In a small town in Michigan, residents are looking for some answers after a popular businessman and father was arrested and accused of being a terrorist.

NBC5's Phil Rogers reported Monday night from New Buffalo, a favorite haunt of Chicagoans who want to get away.

Images: Michigan Man Arrested

Rogers said a favorite spot for visitors to the area is a little Middle Eastern restaurant in nearby Harbor, Mich., that's run by an outgoing immigrant from Turkey.

Rogers said that Ibrahim Parlak is a favorite of the small community on the shores of Lake Michigan.

"They call him a community leader," Rogers said.

Now, "after living an apparently peaceful life outside of Chicago for 10 years," Rogers said, Parlak is in federal custody following his arrest on July 27.

The U.S. government says he is a threat.

"He said, 'Call Dave. I've been arrested,'" Michelle Gazzalo, the mother of Parlak's 7-year-old daughter, told Unit 5.

She said Parlak was arrested on charges that he lied about an alleged terrorist past when he was given asylum in the United States over a dozen years ago. It's an allegation his family says is a misunderstanding and flat wrong.

"He was given asylum on the basis of the very same facts that they're now using against him," Gazzalo said.

In the 1980s, Rogers said, Parlak was part of the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey. A group he associated with, the PKK, was branded a terrorist organization in the mid-90s, years after Parlak had moved to Michigan.

"When he was involved with them, they were not (terrorists)," Parlak's friend, Martin Dzuris, told Unit 5.

"He was never a member of them, he just associated with them because they were the biggest one and they had the most influence (and) the most funding," he said.

Rogers said Parlak did time in Turkey for his Kurdish activism. Then he came to the United States and was granted political asylum.

The federal government now says he hid his Turkish arrest record when he came to America. It is a charge Parlak's supporters vehemently deny.

"He disclosed all the information; his prison sentence, how he was tortured," Dzuris said. "He disclosed his whole life."

"He is not a part of it," said the suspect's brother, Huseyin Parlak. "He has never been a part of any terrorist organization."

On Monday, 7-year-old Olivia spoke with her father who is in the County Jail in Battle Creek, Mich.

His friends insist he constitutes no threat to America, claiming that if he did, the government would be acting very differently.

"Realistically, if he is a threat to our national security, they would come and confiscate his computers and his files (and) everything," Dzuris said. "They never showed up here."

Rogers said that repeated inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security yielded only a phone message saying Parlak was being held as an aggravated felon.

On Tuesday, family members took busloads of supporters to a hearing in Detroit. A judge there ordered Parlak remain in custody as a flight risk.

Rogers said that Parlak is well known in his community and that he has some high-level support from celebrities from the Chicago area.