Immigration crackdown shatters Muslims' lives


That program, which required those men to register with the federal government, is an example of how U.S. authorities increasingly are turning to tactics based not "on individualized suspicion, leads or tips" but instead rooted in "broad-based criteria that are inherently discriminatory, like what country you happened to be born in," said Michael Wishnie, a law professor at New York University who has studied the measures.

"The message to entire communities--Arabs, Muslims and South Asians--is that you are suspect," Wishnie said.

The crackdown has set off an exodus from tightknit Muslim communities in the U.S., from the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis of Chicago's Devon Avenue to the Arabs of such cities as Dearborn, Mich. Even lawful residents have fled, fearing they might be next.

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, many Americans would argue that the crackdown is an appropriate response: Why not try to make the nation safer, while fixing its porous immigration system, starting with people from countries where Muslim extremists live?

In fact, while three of the Sept. 11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, a sweeping, bipartisan congressional probe later cited shoddy intelligence work, not poor immigration enforcement, as being at the root of the nation's vulnerability that day.

A senior Justice Department official, responding to questions about the new immigration initiatives, said they emerged from a series of meetings following the attacks in which participants asked themselves two questions: "Are we doing everything we can to keep Americans safe? And are we using all of the tools at our disposal?"

While there is no evidence that the campaign has thwarted any terrorist plots, the government says it has led to the identification of a handful of men with connections to terrorist groups. Citing national security concerns, the government won't reveal their identities or alleged ties.

One of the architects of the policies said that, with limited resources, selecting men based on their foreign citizenship was logical. "We had to just use the very blunt instrument of nationality," said Kris Kobach, a former Justice Department appointee, who helped craft the program to register more than 83,000 men from Muslim countries who were in the U.S.

The government has targeted people by nationality during earlier times of crisis, most notably with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Though the men now being singled out are not American citizens--and the U.S. always has afforded fewer rights to visitors--their treatment reflects the tension over civil liberties since Sept. 11. Like the debate over the USA Patriot Act, the immigration crackdown has underscored the difficulty of balancing national security with core American values such as justice and freedom.

Certainly, the government continues to enforce immigration laws against other nationalities. That was made abundantly clear last month when federal authorities raided 60 Wal-Marts and later accused the giant retailer of using illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

And the number of deported Mexicans, who make up about 69 percent of all illegal immigrants in the U.S., still dwarfs the number of deportees from Muslim countries.

Yet illegal immigrants from all countries removed in the first 12 months after Sept. 11 decreased by about 16 percent, to 148,619 from 177,452. Over the same period, the administration's dragnet swept up increasing numbers of men from two dozen Muslim countries. The number of Egyptians removed skyrocketed by 201 percent and Jordanians, 144 percent--even before the major initiatives focusing on such men began.

In sheer numbers, Pakistanis have been most affected, mainly because they are by far the biggest group of visitors to the U.S. from Muslim lands.

The impact can be seen in the names on the deportation hearing dockets of the nation's immigration courts. Since Sept. 11, "the demographics have totally changed," said Christopher Helt, an immigration attorney who practices in Chicago, Memphis and Atlanta.

"You went from Gonzalez to Khan. Now 90 percent of my clients are Muslim," Helt said.

Working for a future

The men aboard the Icelandair charter from upstate New York to Islamabad did not always hew to the letter of the nation's immigration laws. But many followed the spirit of the American experience, staking their families' futures on long hours of work on the fringes of this nation's economy.

Seated in the cabin was a 22-year-old New York City resident plucked from his bed in Queens who had just opened his own cell-phone store on the Upper West Side and thought he was legal until agents raided his family's home before dawn last winter.

A few rows away sat Mohammad Akbar, 48, who had befriended beat cops and other customers over coffee at the 7-Eleven where he worked in suburban Philadelphia. He submitted in April to the administration's "special registration" for men from Muslim countries, only to be shackled before the afternoon was out.

Not far from him was a supervisor of car-wash workers who was caught dozing in his car behind a Schaumburg office complex. Authorities detained him on a nearly 8-year-old deportation order. He's now jobless in Pakistan while the wife he left behind in a suburban apartment struggles to pay the bills.

At least a dozen of the 75 men on this flight likely would have been deported anyway because they were convicted of crimes, including drug offenses and assault.

But the vast majority of them were found to be in violation of civil immigration laws, such as remaining in the U.S. on an expired visa. Some spent half a year or more behind bars, wondering if they ever would be reunited with their families. Convinced they faced impossible odds, many finally surrendered their legal battles, unwilling to stay another day in jail.

A post-9/11 scramble

In the first chaotic weeks after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, investigators fanned out across the country in a haphazard, almost desperate scramble to stop what many Americans feared was an impending second wave of terrorism. Given the nation's shock, there was wide public support for such a hunt.

The government detained more than 1,000 people in the initial arrests, virtually all of them held for alleged immigration violations. They were overwhelmingly Arab or Muslim men, with the biggest percentage coming from Pakistan.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft gave the impression that the men were suspected terrorists and that their arrests were preventing new assaults.

But none of those men ever was charged with involvement in the attacks. And for most of them, there was no evidence that they were terrorists, according to a report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, the department's internal watchdog. Responding to that report, FBI officials asserted that they had identified four men, whom they declined to name, linked to terrorism or the hijackers.

Still, a precedent was set: The Justice Department would use the nation's immigration laws as the chief tool in its domestic war on terrorism.

The first of these initiatives, begun in January 2002, seemed logical enough: Go after the 300,000 people whom government records suggested were "absconders"-- those who remained in the U.S. despite orders to leave.

The program, called the "Absconder Apprehension Initiative," filtered its first targets by nationality, aiming only at 5,000 scofflaws from mostly Muslim nations where Al Qaeda was believed to have a presence.

Authorities identified these people by using immigration records, then searched for information about them in phone books, public records and commercial databases. With those leads, teams of federal agents went out to find them.

Like the men aboard the July charter to Islamabad, and others on the four flights before them, they were picked up at their homes or at the pizza parlors, cab stands, gas stations and construction sites where they worked.

To broaden the hunt, the Justice Department ordered that the names of the scofflaws be put into the criminal database used by police departments nationwide. That automatically drew state and local authorities into the enforcement of civil immigration laws, reversing a long-standing practice meant to avoid discouraging immigrants from reporting crimes against them.

While the search was on for the 5,000 pinpointed by nationality, the other the 300,000 absconders from all countries wandered free, and even grew to nearly 400,000 in the course of about 18 months, according to congressional testimony.

The Department of Homeland Security, which inherited responsibility for immigration in March, moved into a second phase of the program in June, identifying the most violent offenders who had outstanding deportation orders.

It had been a full year and a half since the absconder initiative was first outlined by the Justice Department.

Bittersweet reunions


After landing in Islamabad, the first of the July deportees walked through the glass doors of Chaklala International Airport's arrival area into a crush of local reporters. Though largely unnoticed in the U.S., the men are front-page news in Pakistan.

A hundred ceiling fans stirred the hot air above them. Taxi drivers cheered American professional wrestling bouts blaring from television sets overhead as greeting parties smothered pilgrims from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, with kisses and necklaces of marigolds.

A smaller, more anxious cluster of boys and men met the deportees. One young man stood dressed in a white "New York, New York" T-shirt, complete with the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. His brother had been living in Brooklyn, working at a chain store before he was detained.

Nearby, a teenager carried a cell phone to alert his mother the moment his older brother was home safely. It was the brother's string of jobs at Baltimore gas stations that had been the family's lifeline.

"[He] was our only hope," the young man said. "Now they're sending him back, so God knows what will happen."

The return to Pakistan for another man, Amir Shah, began five months earlier and 7,000 miles away, in a handicap parking space in Schaumburg.

It was just after 5 a.m. on Feb. 23 when a local police officer found Shah asleep inside the Pakistani's 1997 Chrysler Concorde. Shah, who oversaw car-wash crews, was parked behind his employer's office on Golf Road. He was waiting for his boss to arrive when the police officer noticed him, pulled up in a squad car and rousted Shah from his slumber.

The officer ran Shah's name in the National Crime Information Center database, commonly known as NCIC, and got a hit: Although Shah had not been charged with a crime, he was wanted on an immigration warrant for an outstanding deportation order, police records show.

"I have a nice job, am doing everything good, never doing any crime," Shah said of his life in Schaumburg during an interview in the guest room of his family's flat in Mandi Bahauddin, about three hours south of Islamabad.

He told the arresting officer that he knew he had remained in the U.S. illegally, but Shah believed his 1999 marriage in a New York mosque to Habeeba Nayeem, a green-card holder at the time who later became a U.S. citizen, would shield him from deportation.

Holders of green cards--the prized plastic card signifying its holder is a legal resident, though not a citizen of the U.S.--can sponsor spouses for their own cards. Although it is unclear whether Shah would have had a chance of winning approval, Nayeem delayed filing the paperwork.

She had long heard cautionary tales--including from customers at the Schaumburg hair salon where she works--about men marrying only to get legal residency. She wanted to make sure Shah's intentions were true.

To test him, Nayeem had decided she would wait to file the sponsorship papers; she wanted to see if he would try to hustle her to an immigration lawyer after their wedding.

He never did, passing her test. But time slipped away and she had not filed the paperwork before her husband was detained.

Now she blames herself for the result. "I feel guilty," Nayeem said, sitting in her living room in a working-class Schaumburg apartment complex, where women and young men in traditional Pakistani dress are a common sight. "I want to fight for him."

Shah's new life is a world apart from his old one.

Except for short spans of blacktop here and there, the last major stretch of roadway to Mandi Bahauddin is made of dirt and stone. Men swinging hammers at rock piles along the shoulder struggle to fill the many ruts. Cars, motorbikes and brightly decorated buses with passengers hanging from the sides narrowly miss each other as they race by in opposite directions.

Boys frequently interrupt the traffic, herding cows and goats across the road and into the Upper Jhelum Canal.

Inside the town, women wash clothes in roadside ditches brimming with brown water. The street in front of Shah's home, alongside an open sewer, is so narrow that even if it were here, the Chrysler Concorde he used to drive past Woodfield Mall wouldn't fit.

Nayeem visited for about a month shortly after Shah returned to Pakistan. Back in Schaumburg, she hopes the help of a legal-aid service eventually will return her husband to America.

Shah, who earned a degree in physics before he came to the U.S., still is without work. He is forced to rely on the help of his brothers, who occasionally give him money, according to Nayeem.

"It's not so easy there to get a job," she said. "It's a very big problem, hard time for him."

As for Nayeem, she struggles to get to her hairdresser job every day because she has diabetes and other ailments. Without Shah's income, she fights to pay the bills and the rent.

Words vs. deeds

During a Sept. 13, 2001, news conference in Washington, Ashcroft urged Americans not to "descend to the level of those who perpetrated Tuesday's violence by targeting individuals based on race, religion or national origin."

Yet the administration went on to launch a program centered on nationality that would register 83,310 men in the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries. Told that it was their legal obligation, many complied, only to face deportation.

Ashcroft introduced the core of the program, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, in June 2002. In doing so he described it as nothing more than carrying out a small piece of a 1996 law that asked the Justice Department to better track the arrivals and departures of every one of the estimated 35 million foreign visitors to the U.S. each year.

But Ashcroft also used his own authority to go much further than Congress had mandated. Tapping decades-old statutory provisions, his department created a separate registration program for men who already were in the U.S. as foreign visitors. Nationality would become the determining factor in deciding which of them would be required to comply.

If terrorists were living secretly in the U.S., the registration would put "people who are up to no good on notice," said the Justice Department official last week, special on condition of anonymity. They would have to "either come in and register, which they don't want to do, or they risk not complying and fear we're going to come and get them."

In introducing the registration program, the attorney general answered questions about possible discrimination against Muslims by saying that only foreigners from nations designated as state sponsors of terrorism would face a blanket edict to register.

Five months later, the Justice Department named its first official targets: men from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, all Muslim countries on the State Department's terrorism list.

But over the next 10 weeks, the Justice Department revealed that the domestic registration list would grow to include all men who were foreign visitors from 19 other predominantly Muslim nations. Turkey and Uzbekistan were the only large Muslim countries not on the list. North Korea, a designated state sponsor of terrorism, was the only non-Muslim country added.

Under the edict, men would have to report to the federal government for photographs, fingerprinting and questioning.

Because some American Muslims endured taunts and even physical attacks after Sept. 11, some community leaders saw the registration as an opportunity to demonstrate the law-abiding nature of their countrymen. Sadruddin Noorani, a business owner and leader in Chicago's Pakistani community, hit the hustings last winter as the registration deadline approached.

He spoke on ethnic radio programs. He held weekly seminars, renting restaurants, community centers and hotel ballrooms. On Jan. 12, 2003, the day before registration began for Pakistanis, more than 700 people crowded into the Ramada Plaza O'Hare to hear Noorani and others repeat a mantra he wrote on a slip of paper he keeps in his wallet to this day.

"Willfully violating the law of the land by not registering," it reads, "you will face the consequences."

Hundreds of families with questions about their immigration status were torn: Should they register and risk deportation or ignore the call to register and hope no federal agents hunted them down?

Thousands chose to pack all they owned into trucks, vans and taxis and drive to Canada--hoping for refugee status.

Once the program was under way, some influential Democrats in Congress were furious that Ashcroft had claimed congressional authority for his actions but had not consulted them before initiating the registration.

In a letter to Ashcroft dated Dec. 23, 2002, three lawmakers on Capitol Hill's judiciary committees--Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan--demanded answers. They said there were "grave doubts" about whether the program struck a proper balance between civil liberties and security.

The program, they said, "appears to be a component of a second wave of roundups and detentions of Arab and Muslim males disguised as a perfunctory registration requirement."



The Justice Department made no substantial changes, denying the registration was discriminatory. Its lawyers have pointed to a legal principle, known as the plenary power doctrine, that gives the government broad authority to selectively enforce immigration laws with limited oversight from the courts.

One of the last corners of the law where such selective enforcement still is allowed, the plenary power doctrine was established by the Supreme Court at the end of the 19th Century in upholding the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the U.S. after Congress deemed them "undesirable."

That doctrine often has insulated the government from claims that it is violating the Constitution's equal protection clause when it imposes different burdens among immigrant groups.


The domestic campaign, said the senior official at the Justice Department, has "put some effectiveness into the immigration law for at least a subset of visitors, and to that extent I think it's been valuable."

But that argument rings hollow in the Muslim enclaves of America, where community leaders such as Noorani warn that the unequal treatment of Muslim men inevitably will create a backlash.

Those deported through the campaign, he predicted, will say: "We were a good ambassador to this country. We worked hard. We paid our taxes. We committed no crimes. And they kicked us out."

Similar resentment can be heard in the hometowns of the men on the July Icelandair flight--sprawling urban centers such as Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi as well as villages in Pakistan's hinterlands.

"People in every class of Pakistani society think differently about the U.S.," Khurran Nazir, 23, an Islamabad street vendor, said when asked about the recent deportation of Pakistani men. "The U.S. does not like Muslims."

Of the roughly 83,000 who registered, the government moved to deport 13,740 for various immigration violations. Government officials point out that once the men registered, agents could not ignore alleged violations.

Many of the men are fighting their cases, but few can expect to succeed, according to lawyers who have run mass legal clinics for them.

In the end, many forced out of the U.S. will never appear in deportation statistics. Chiefly to save taxpayer money, the government says it has been encouraging the vast majority of men caught in the dragnet to accept what is known as voluntary departure--a sort of immigration plea bargain that effectively results in self-deportation.

Many already are gone.

A costly compliance

With a pencil-thin mustache and a jittery, lanky frame, Mohammad Akbar was anxious by nature.

But he also knew that he was in violation of immigration laws, thanks to a 1995 deportation order that he still was fighting. He worried that any infraction, even a parking ticket, would mean trouble.

So when he heard in the spring that the federal government was requiring registration of all men visiting from Pakistan, Akbar had to weigh the dangers of visiting the local Immigration and Naturalization Service office. He decided, finally, that he could not flout the law.

"I went because I'm scared--if they catch me without registration, they come arrest me," he said. "I have to follow the U.S. law. . . . They said to register."

Akbar arrived in America in November 1990. Not long after, he found work at a 7-Eleven on Gibbsboro Road in Lindenwold, N.J., eventually moving up to manager and earning $7.50 an hour.

Despite the modest wage, life was good. His customers, including local cops, had become a sort of second family. He even married one of the regulars, a Jersey native he got to know in long, late-night chats at the convenience store.

"We all know him--great guy," said Sgt. Douglas Reynolds of the Lindenwold police. "If he didn't see an officer for a while, he would ask how he was doing, just to make sure he was all right."

Akbar stepped into the INS office in Cherry Hill, N.J., on April 25. Things seemed to be going fine at first as he sat down across from an immigration agent. The agent was cordial, only jokingly asking if Akbar was a member of any fundamentalist Islamic groups or if he knew any terrorists.

"I don't know anybody" connected to such groups, Akbar recalled telling him. "I'm not like that."

But when the agent got to the matter of his 1995 deportation order, the tenor of the conversation shifted. "I'm sorry," he remembers the agent telling him. "You must go to jail."

Guards stepped into the interview room with shackles, Akbar said. They cuffed his hands and feet and led him away to the Monmouth County Jail as he pleaded with them.

"I told them: `I'm not a murderer. I invested money in the bank. I do work hard,' " he said. "But no mercy. There's no mercy."

Despite their differences, even Akbar's estranged wife, Tamika Lindsay, couldn't understand his treatment. "You're talking a man . . . whose only crime was his visa ran out," she said.

In late July, along a narrow concrete alley in the Pakistani town of Hazro, the brilliant blue doors of the Akbar family home swung open. Thirteen years after Mariyam Khursheed's youngest son left for America, there he stood.

She took her 48-year-old son's head in her hands, kissed his forehead and gave thanks to Allah. "I'm 82 years old and I'm sick," Akbar later recalled her telling him. "I thought I would never see you again in my life."

He was not returning to poverty. Generations of his family have made a good living in Hazro, which sits a couple of hours northwest of Islamabad along the ancient Grand Trunk Road, past donkey-drawn carts and marble strip mines.

His older brother Shamroze is a real estate broker. Before going to America, Akbar ran a small grocery store.

Sitting inside the cramped courtyard of the family's home, he decried how he was treated in America but said he held no ill will toward U.S. citizens.

"The American people didn't do this to me," he said. "It was the government."

Having managed during his time in the U.S. to put away about $20,000, Akbar said he hoped to use some of that to open a business in Hazro or perhaps Karachi.

His ultimate goal, though, remains the same: to return to the U.S.

"I know America better than my motherland because I live a long time there," he said.

"One day," his brother Shamroze added, "they will realize that they were wrong, and he will go back."

- - -

TRIBUNE FINDINGS

Since Sept. 11, 2001:

83,310: Number of foreign visitors from 24 predominantly Muslim nations who registered with the government after U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft required them to do so.*

13,740: Number of those 83,310 who were ordered into deportation proceedings.

0: Number who were publicly charged with terrorism, although officials say a few have terrorism connections.

*North Koreans also required to register.

- - -

Profiling illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, authorities have increasingly focused on nationality in immigration enforcement. Deportation orders have increased markedly for unauthorized immigrants from 24 predominantly Muslim countries while those from other nations face no extra scrutiny.

Increase in deportation orders higher for Muslim countries

Comparing the two-year period after Sept. 11, 2001, to the two-year period before:

2 percent of unauthorized immigrants are from 24 predominantly Muslim nations, which saw a +31.4% rise in deportation orders since Sept. 11

Unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. (Total: About 7 million)

98 percent of unauthorized immigrants are from other countries, which saw a +3.4% rise in deportation orders since Sept. 11

- - -

CHANGE IN NUMBER OF DEPORTATION ORDERS AFTER SEPT. 11

For 24 predominantly Muslim countries


NATION BEFORE AFTER INCREASE OVER% CHANGE Oct. 1, 1999, to Oct. 1, 2001, to PREVIOUS 2 YEARS Sept. 30, 2001 Sept. 30, 2003 Indonesia 631 1,852 1,221 193.5% Pakistan 1,842 2,686 844 45.8% Egypt 453 993 540 119.2% Jordan 411 741 330 80.3% Morocco 168 398 230 136.9% Iraq 220 381 161 73.2% Tunisia 54 212 158 292.6% Saudi Arabia 55 181 126 229.1% Lebanon 393 504 111 28.2% Sudan 202 309 107 53.0% Yemen 159 263 104 65.4% Syria 164 252 88 53.7% Eritrea 118 168 50 42.4% Afghanistan 145 194 49 33.8% U.A.E. 4 24 20 500.0% Algeria 138 153 15 10.9% Kuwait 59 64 5 8.5% Oman 2 6 4 200.0% Qatar 3 7 4 133.3% Bahrain 17 15 -2 -11.8% Libya 16 11 -5 -31.3% Iran 794 725 -69 -8.7% Bangladesh 1,085 618 -467 -43.0% Somalia 1,644 772 -872 -53.0% Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review Chicago Tribune/Valerie Cotsalas and Dionisio Munoz