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Middle Easterners Targeted By U.S. Immigration Authorities
With additional reporting by Ayesha Ahmad
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The U.S. Justice Department has decided to begin searching for thousands of Middle Eastern men who have defied deportation orders and disappeared across the country, a U.S. daily reported Tuesday.
According to the Washington Post, about 6,000 young men from nations the U.S. claims harbor members of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network have ignored deportation orders and will now be sought, arrested and forcibly removed from the country.
Although the majority of the more than 300,000 foreign nationals sought by the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) for ignoring deportation orders are Hispanic, the Post said, the Justice Department is choosing to target those who fit the "terrorist profile" first - young men of Middle Eastern background.
U.S. officials claimed some of the men they seek have criminal backgrounds, the article added, but they would not provide any more details or name specific countries of origin.
Jean AbiNader, managing director of the Arab American Institute, said that the issue was not with the deportation laws themselves, but with the methods chosen.
"I don't disagree with the fact that people who overstayed their visa should be deported," he said. "I do disagree with singling out people from the Middle East without any criteria other than their origin."
AbiNader said authorities should deal more carefully with extenuating circumstances among illegal immigrants and that they should understand communities before making decisions that can drastically affect lives.
Omar Kader, a Middle East specialist and CEO of Planning and Learning Technologies (PaL-Tech), said that such measures become unjustified when they target specific ethnic groups.
"That's where I consider the profiling to be sloppy, lazy law enforcement," he told IslamOnline. "It's unjustified profiling when they enforce immigration laws that are aimed primarily at one group of people."
But Kader, who has served as executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the United Palestinian Appeal, also said that Muslims and Arabs should try to understand where law enforcement authorities are coming from.
"You have to be realistic," he said. "If you were given the job of finding out who is a threat to America, you wouldn't start with the Norwegians and the Swedes. You have to think, where's the threat coming from right now."
U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has claimed that his anti-terrorism legislation package - covering everything from secret military tribunals and enhanced wiretapping authority to immigrant detentions - does not target anyone on the basis of ethnicity.
Officials say that this new program is aimed not at a single group, but at all foreign nationals who are here illegally, and that the targeting of Arabs or Muslims is simply “common sense” as a precaution, the Post article said.
"We are going to continue to use our anti-terrorism task forces to pursue people . . . who may have information helpful in our investigation, and that means focusing on people from countries with active Al-Qaeda cells," an anonymous Justice official was quoted in the Post as saying.
But AbiNader said that time would tell how racially or ethnically unbiased the program was.
"Let's see how many Hispanics and Asians are picked up for overstays in the next three months," he said. "That'll be the key."
Critics say that Ashcroft is on dangerous ground in terms of the breadth of power the legislation gives to government.
"We currently have an attorney general who is probably the most dangerous attorney general that we've had in recent memory when it comes to civil liberties," Kader said.
The Post article quoted Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, as saying that this "dragnet" approach was dubious.
"Obviously, these are highly sensitive times and nothing prevents INS from following leads to apprehend suspects, even if those leads include descriptions based on race or national origin," Henderson said in the article.
"But a dragnet approach to law enforcement - rounding up men based on national origin rather than suspicious behavior or credible evidence - is highly questionable."
The Post said about 314,000 names are being added to the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, allowing authorities to alert the INS if they find someone in violation of a deportation order. About 6,000 names of Muslim and Arab men were drawn from a search of the list and are being entered into the database first, the article said.
Kader emphasized that Arab- and Muslim-Americans should be aware of how the country has changed after September 11, and "had better wake up" to the fact that they are viewed in a certain way, reiterating the perspective of the authorities.
"Law enforcement is under enormous pressure right now," he said. "We have to be as careful in our view of law enforcement as we want them to be about Muslims and Arabs."
Arab American Institute president, James Zogby, noted in the Post article that since most of the 19 hijackers suspected in the September 11 attacks were in the U.S. legally, targeting Middle Eastern immigrant men was not necessarily useful.
"There's no question because of September 11 there's a lower tolerance level for visa overstays, and there's a hyper-sensitivity to Arab overstays," Zogby said.
"The question is whether it's an effective use of law enforcement to go after all these absconders when the purpose is to avert terrorism. The answer is no, it's not."
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