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INS Official Walks Out of Mazen Al-Najjar’s Detention Review
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Mazen
Al-Najjar, seen here with one of his daughters, at his release
in December 2000. He was re-detained in November 2001.
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By Ayesha Ahmad, IOL Washington correspondent
TAMPA,
Florida, June 14 (IslamOnline) - The family of detained
Palestinian-American Mazen Al-Najjar suffered another blow in their
exhaustive battle for his release when an interviewing official walked
out of Al-Najjar’s six-month detention evaluation on Thursday, June
13, dashing hopes for a positive result from the long-awaited review.
The
official, an interviewer with the Immigration and Naturalization
Services (INS) - which scheduled the review last month when lawyers
challenged Al-Najjar’s detention - was reacting to the fact that
Al-Najjar had not been able to find a country willing to receive him
if he were to be deported, according to a press release by the Tampa
Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace, an organization formed in support
of Al-Najjar.
Since
Al-Najjar’s phone privileges are severely limited - until mid-May,
he was only allowed one 15-minute call per week, and even now, phone
calls are cut off after 15 minutes - it is not likely that he would be
able to secure a country on his own, the press release said, but he
has his family working on it.
“It
looks to us that the INS was never serious about this custody
review,” said Al-Najjar’s attorney, Joe Hohenstein, quoted in the
press release. “It was simply a charade in order to continue the
unlawful detention of Dr. Al-Najjar.”
INS
statutes say that if the government is unable to deport a detainee
within 180 days of the final deportation order, the detainee must be
released; Al-Najjar is a stateless Palestinian and his detention can
only continue if he is proven to present a flight risk, national
security threat, or to have been uncooperative in bringing about his
removal.
A
federal judge has already ruled that he is not a national security
threat; supporters say that with no country willing to take him, he
hardly poses a flight risk, and he has been cooperative and responsive
with all efforts to resolve his situation.
Al-Najjar,
formerly an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, has
spent a total of 1,509 days in jail without ever having been charged
for any crime.
A
Palestinian born in Kuwait, he came to the U.S. twenty years ago and
has three American-born daughters; he was arrested in 1997 on
“secret evidence”
due to his association with the two Islamic organizations in Florida
that were accused - but never charged - of being fronts for terrorist
support networks after one of their members turned up as the new head
of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 1995.
He
was also never charged, and was denied bail on the basis of evidence
neither he nor his lawyers ever saw. In 1999, a habeas corpus federal
court lawsuit was filed; in May 2000, it was found that Al-Najjar had
been denied due process during his bail hearing.
In
October, another judge ruled that Al-Najjar was not a threat to
national security as his detractors had claimed in trying to keep him
incarcerated, because there were no “facially legitimate and bona
fide reasons to conclude that [Respondent] is a threat to national
security.”
Finally,
after then-Attorney General Janet Reno blocked the government’s
appeal to continue his detention, Al-Najjar was freed in December
2000, only to be re-arrested this past November on a visa violation.
Now,
he remains behind bars because he can’t find a country that will
take him, as none of the eight countries applied to so far - Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority,
Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, South Africa and Guyana - have agreed,
according to Sami Al-Arian, Al-Najjar’s brother-in-law and the head
of the Tampa Bay Coalition.
“That’s
the irony,” Al-Arian was quoted in a St. Petersburg Times
article Thursday, June 13, as saying. “You would think it’s the
other way around, that they would find him a country.”
The
Coalition’s press release said that Al-Najjar’s legal team has
submitted over 200 pages of documentation detailing the efforts they
have all made to secure a place for his deportation.
“We
have already documented extensively our efforts to get him a travel
document and find him a country,” Hohenstein said in the press
release. “On the other hand, as far as we can tell, the U.S.
government, with its massive resources, has not done much and yet
expects us to find him a country.”
Al-Najjar’s
family is tired of the unending ordeal and are ready to leave with
him, according to the Times article.
“It’s
an injustice and completely unfair,” Fedaa, Al-Najjar’s wife, was
quoted in the article as saying. “I think enough is enough. We
don’t want to live in this horrible situation.”
The couple’s oldest daughter, 13-year-old Yara,
said in the Coalition’s press release, “Why is my country doing
this to us? This is unjust.”
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