Iman Elashi, 17, right, makes a statement to the media regarding the arrest of her father in Dallas

WASHINGTON, December 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Hundreds of Middle Eastern and North African men, some just 16, have been hauled into custody across southern California in the past few days, enraging civil liberties groups and drawing comparisons with the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during WWII, news agencies reported Friday, December 20.

The round-ups in Los Angeles, San Diego and suburban Orange County were part of a counter-terrorism initiative by the Bush administration, requiring men and teenagers from specific countries to register with the immigration authorities and have their fingerprints taken, reported British daily The Independent.

Several thousand citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan – many of them accompanied by lawyers – willingly came forward across southern California to meet Monday's deadline.

However, as many as a quarter of them – estimates vary between 500 and 1,000 people – were arrested on the basis of apparently minor visa violations and herded into jail cells under threat of deportation.

Lawyers reported that some detainees were forced to stand up all night for lack of room, that some were placed in shackles, and others were hosed down with cold water before being thrown into unheated cells.

They said the numbers were so high that authorities were talking about transferring several hundred detainees to Arizona to await immigration hearings and deportation orders, the paper said.

Flawed, Misguided Scheme

Both the lawyers and the southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the round-up as an outrage that did not advance the fight against terrorism one inch and very possibly hindered it.

At a public demonstration in Los Angeles Wednesday, December 18, at least 3,000 protesters waved signs saying "What next? Concentration camps?" and "Detain terrorists, not innocent immigrants".

"All of our fundamental civil rights have been violated by these actions," one lawyer, Ban al-Wardi, told the Los Angeles Times after 14 of her 20 clients were arrested during the registration process. "I don't know how far this is going to go before people start speaking up. This is a very dangerous precedent we are setting. What's to stop Americans from being treated like this when they travel overseas?"

In one case, a 16-year-old boy was ripped from his mother's arms and told he would never return home. The mother is a legal resident married to an American citizen. Many of the detainees came from Los Angeles' large Iranian Jewish population and are highly unlikely to have any link to militant Islamic guerrilla groups.

Civil liberties groups in the U. S. have called on the justice department to scrap the anti-terror scheme, and a coalition of nine civil liberties groups called it a "flawed and misguided" scheme which has "damaged America's global image", according to the BBC news online.

The detentions have caused deep unrest within the Iranian-American community in California, with thousands taking to the streets earlier this week in protest.

California is home to about 600,000 Iranians who have been living in exile since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Iranian-American Lawyers Association president Kayhan Shakhib said he feared that the men were being held in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.

California was among the first states where non-resident men from the Middle East were obliged to register. Other states with large Muslim populations have been set later dates.

No Comment: INS

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has refused to say how many people were arrested, but did not dispute one report putting the number of detainees at between 500 and 700.

However, they acknowledged anyone with a slight visa irregularity was subject to arrest, regardless of personal histories.

The detainees' lawyers challenged the government to produce any evidence of criminal behavior among their clients, let alone a link to international terrorist groups.

The registration scheme was conceived by President Bush's ultra-conservative Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and had already come under criticism for what opponents call blatant discrimination.