WASHINGTON/LOS ANGELES, 11 January 2003 — Foreign-born Muslims living in the United States were yesterday bracing for a possible new wave of arrests as a deadline loomed for Middle Eastern immigrants to register under new anti-terror rules.
Hundreds of Muslim immigrants have already been arrested and face deportation as they tried to meet today’s “special registration” deadline. The controversial program was designed to register, fingerprint and question thousands of Muslim male foreigners from countries the Bush administration has identified as terrorist states.
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.
Today’s registration deadline affects men from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and North Korea. Saudis and Pakistanis, in another round of “special registration,” must appear at Immigration and Naturalization Service offices by Feb. 21.
Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations, civil liberties and religious groups have strongly condemned the INS procedures. Ambassadors of these countries filed a joint objection against this “special registration,” but were rebuffed.
“On Tuesday, a group of ambassadors asked the State Department for an extension, so that our nationals would have time to complete this requirement. We were told it was not possible,” Tunisian Ambassador Hatem Atallah said.
“The consequences are very dire and very serious indeed, not just for the Arab-American and Muslim community, but for the civil liberties in general in this country,” said Khalil Jahshan, executive vice president at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
“Over half the people who were detained in Los Angeles and San Diego had legal papers or papers that were being processed. In spite of this, they were detained and not allowed bail,” said Dr. Sam Hamod, co-chairman of Muslim coalition of San Diego, which represents about 60,000 Muslims in the area.
This despite the fact that the FBI and San Diego’s police chief told Hamod that “the Arab and Muslim communities in America have the lowest crime rate of any ethnic group in America.”
