WASHINGTON, 8 June 2003 — About 16 percent of Arab and Muslim men who voluntarily came forward to register with the United States government have been declared illegal immigrants who may now face deportation, the New York Times reported yesterday.
That is likely to produce the largest wave of deportations of Arab and Muslim men from the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the paper said.
Since that time the US government has instituted much tighter controls on foreigners living on US soil, attempting to weed out suspected “terrorists” or prevent them from entering the country.
Hence a special registration program required non-citizen men from 25 Arab and Muslim countries to register with US immigration authorities between December and April of this year.
Of the 82,000 who came forward, more than 13,000 were found to be in the United States illegally and now face deportation, the Times said.
But of those 82,000 men, and “tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings” in the last six months, only 11 had links to “terrorism”, it said.
Many came forward in false hopes their cooperation would result in leniency on the part of immigration officials. Critics say the policies are discriminatory.
“What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law,” the paper quoted Lucas Guttentag of the American Civil Liberties Union as saying.
