LOS ANGELES, January 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A federal judge in Santa Ana, near Los Angeles, refused Thursday, January 9, to grant a restraining order barring immigration officials from detaining Middle Eastern immigrants, as thousands of them are rushing to comply with a deadline to register with authorities under anti-terror laws introduced following the 11 September attacks.

A coalition of Arab-American and Iranian-American groups had requested the order as part of a lawsuit they filed against the U.S. government following the December detentions, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Friday, January 10.

Up to 1,000 men from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, who came forward in earlier registration processes, including many whose papers were in order or who were awaiting their U.S. residency permits, are currently being held by U.S. authorities, according to human rights advocates.

U.S. officials however, put the number at around 250.

Human rights groups said that many of the detained men were genuinely going through the complex process of obtaining permanent residency status, or a so-called "green card", reported the BBC News Online.

The arrests also became a public relations disaster for the Bush administration, with critics saying that it is unlikely that terrorists would take part in a voluntary registration program.

Friday is the cut-off for males over the age of 16 from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to sign up or face arrest.

Men from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia must register by 21 February.

The controversial "special registration" effort has attracted widespread condemnation from civil rights groups and has been the subject of numerous legal challenges.

Under the scheme male foreign nationals from countries identified as harboring terror groups must be fingerprinted, photographed and questioned when registering.

Several cities reported queues of people from the early hours of Friday morning, despite many voicing concern that they may be detained.

Meanwhile, the growing anxiety over Friday's cutoff mounted. To prevent mass detentions, Muslim community leaders said they were fielding 160 human rights monitors to immigration stations in the Los Angeles area, where the last wave of arrests took place.

"People in the community are obviously still very anxious, indeed, about coming forward to register, given what happened to so many of them last time," said Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.

"There is a lot of fear, but hopefully the fact that we have monitors out there will help instill community confidence that the American system really is working after all," he said.

Al-Marayati said the presence of the monitors, who will don ‘fluorescent-yellow’ shirts to identify themselves at registration stations, would help calm jitters over the arrests, which caused a major public outcry.

"According to information we have been able to gather, we do not think there will be detentions on anything like the same scale as we saw last month," he said, adding that people whose immigration papers were in order and those awaiting permanent residency cards would unlikely be held this time.

Many illegal immigrants fear that they may suffer the same fate as those being held.

"I'm totally scared," 28-year-old Chedli Fathi, whose student visa expired in 2001, told the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.