Portfolio at NYU

Posted 03.31.03
In the Lives of Undocumented Muslims Post 9-11
Shattered families for security's sake

By Aleksandra Todorova

The wedding picture on the TV stand in Eman and Shabaan's living room was taken two months before they left Alexandria on a honeymoon visit to her uncle in Edison, N.J. But while in New Jersey, Eman found out she was pregnant and family friends advised them to stay. So they did.
Ten years later, the Egyptian couple is raising three children in a serene working-class neighborhood where two-floor houses form a neat ellipse around a playground; a car or two are parked in each backyard; autumn leaves color the front lawns; and carved Halloween pumpkins decorate the porches in the weeks before the holiday, just the way children love it.

The children do well in school, Eman says. Her daughter is in the second grade and the eldest son is a third-grader at the local public school. The little one is two years old. None of them speaks or wants to learn Arabic—unlike their parents, the children are American.

Eman and Shabaan's honeymoon lasted for years. Until last spring, every other week, the family would head out in their green Chevy Malibu on shopping trips to New York City, or just for fun. Every Saturday they had dinner together at a restaurant.

Shabaan worked two jobs, as a van driver for Worldbac from 7 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, and as a nightshift driver on the railroad from 4:30 in the afternoon to 4:30 in the morning.

"I worked like a horse to give a good life to my kids, to my family," he says, "and we built a good life here."

On April 24, 2002, INS agents came to Shabaan's house and took him to the Middlesex County Jail in North Brunswick, N.J., on charges of violating a 1996 deportation order. They told him he would be questioned and sent back home in a couple of days. Shabaan told his wife to call his managers and tell them he was in hospital and would be back to work in a couple of weeks. However, he did not come back for three months. The honeymoon was over.

The family no longer eats out on Saturday evenings. The shopping trips are now rare. The TV stand is empty where the cable box once stood, and the computer in the corner is turned off—they can't afford an Internet connection, either. Shabaan lost his jobs shortly after he was detained, and the work he found when he was released pays $250 a week, not enough to cover the $1,200 rent, let alone car payments. The family is drawing on savings, but what happens when that well dries up? Shabaan avoids that question. He has another one instead.

"I'm not mad at the U.S. government for the detentions," he starts. "That's all right, you've got to protect your country. But why keep innocent people?"

Shabaan didn't know it, but his detention was a result of the Absconder Apprehension Initiative, a Department of Justice effort undertaken in late January this year to rid the country of immigration-law violators—a particularly scrutinized group in the War on Terror. In a Memorandum sent to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state police departments, the DOJ orders these agencies to "locate, apprehend, interview and deport" those who have overstayed their visas or have violated previous deportation orders. The DOJ estimates there are about 314,000 such individuals in the United States. The initiative focuses on the "several thousand among that group who come from countries in which there has been Al Qaeda terrorist presence or activity," the memo reads. The DOJ names these people "priority absconders."

By October 31, the arrests under the Absconder Apprehension Initiative totaled 978 and the number changes every day, said INS spokeswoman Nancy Cohen. However, detainees are counted separately and their number has not been released since November 2001. The Department of Justice also has refused to release the names of the detainees to human rights organizations, and has started to hold closed deportation hearings, for security concerns.

"The Government is veiling its actions behind a cloak of secrecy," says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It has not stopped arresting and detaining immigrants, but it has stopped labeling them 911 detainees. We fear this is beginning to be 'business as usual' for them."

If detaining Muslim and Arab immigrants is becoming "business as usual," call Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn a main business artery. Not a night goes by without an arrest in a 10-block radius off the Avenue, bringing the number of arrests into the hundreds to date, according to Bobby Khan, a Pakistani who founded the Coney Island Avenue Project to support detainees and their families living in the neighborhood.

"Yesterday, two people I know were arrested," said Khan over a cup of coffee in Greenwich Village in late October. "Tomorrow, I am driving three families to New Jersey. One has a court date. The other -- her husband was detained when she was eight and a half months pregnant. She now has a three-month-old baby, and two other kids."

A financial planner by day, Khan solicits funds to bail out detainees and help their families by night. Every evening he drives to one of the detention centers in New York and New Jersey to meet detainees. He visits them instead of the families who are afraid to show up in public "because most people have this immigration-status problem." He also takes phone calls from detainees and then speaks to the families, who cannot afford the $1-a-minute collect calls. Just last week, he says, he bailed out five people, but it's getting harder to help Khan says, because the bonds that used to be in the $10,000-$15,000 range now can be as high as $25,000.

In the case of "absconders," it is up to the judge to determine whether there will be a bond and how much it will cost, according to Elizabeth OuYoung, a lawyer assisting the Coney Island Avenue Project. The judge usually looks at whether the detainee is a flight risk, whether he has a family, a house, or whether he has a history of previous court violations.

The odds were against Waheed Ibrahim, an Egyptian who arrived to the United States in 1986, received a deportation order in 1995, and in 1996 married an American woman, which gave him temporary legal status. However, a year later his wife did not appear in court for their first hearing, a mandatory legal procedure for couples in which one spouse is not a citizen. Its purpose is to ensure the marriage is bona fide. A second hearing date was set but Ibrahim could not track down his wife to make the appearance. Fearing he would be deported if they again failed to appear in court together, he simply disappeared.

Immigration authorities finally found him on June 4 of this year, in the home he by then was sharing with Robyn Rose and her two children from a previous marriage. Rose considers herself his wife, and her 14-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son think of him as his father. The family had just moved to Florida from Seaport, Coney Island, and Waheed had come back to their old house to collect the rest of their belongings.

He had a court violation record, no legal marriage to his partner, and was arrested thousands of miles from where he had settled. The judge did not set a bond for him.

On word of his arrest, Rose Immediately drove to the Middlesex County Jail, where Ibrahim was being held. Over the course of the next few months she spent all her savings on lawyers' fees. She lost her job in Florida and got evicted from the apartment the family had just rented. For four months, she stayed with friends in Brooklyn, wrote letters to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. and pleaded with many organizations for help in the case.

When she saw that nothing was working out, she returned to Florida, got her job and apartment back, and is now trying to pull her life and family together. Although Rose is a U.S. citizen, she cannot marry Ibrahim without a divorce from his wife, whose whereabouts are unknown.

For Robyn, what the Government is doing is simply making her and her family suffer. "Was an American man taking care of my kids? No! He was! By detaining a Muslim man, they are also hurting a very blond, blue-eyed American woman," she says and then gives the phone to her son, who only has to ask, "Can you please get my daddy back? I miss him so much, we used to play soccer together."

Shubh Mathur, a doctoral anthropology student in New York, repeatedly visits the jails and detention centers, with families or by herself. She hasn't bailed out as many people as Khan, but she did accept their collect phone calls until her telephone service was cut off. The monthly bill came at $4,000, and she is still waiting for a nonprofit organization to cover it. In the meantime, her jail visits have become more frequent.

On the bus to Paterson, N.J. one Saturday morning, on her way to visit Abdellah Alawi-Harouni, a Moroccan who is detained at the Passaic County Jail on a $15,000 bond, Shubh talks of her experience with detainees. "It's just ridiculous. They don't see the sun for months. They are constantly being watched," she says. "Some of these guys, when they get out, sleep in the subway. They don't want to stay with friends. It's just the idea of being independent!"

According to legal scholars, however, "it" is not ridiculous. "It's the correct treatment," says Professor Alberto Benitez, director of the Immigration Clinic at George Washington University Law School. "The aliens who are subject to the absconder program are aliens who already have removal orders against them. The INS has simply been unable to execute these orders, due to lack of personnel or for bureaucratic reasons. They are now going to be subject to what is coming to them."

Ultimately, Professor Benitez says, the detainees will be deported. In some cases, however, detainees have no country to be deported to. This is the case of Palestinian Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a political activist well-known in New York's immigrant communities, who was picked up from his home in Corona, Queens on April 26 on charges of violating a 1995 deportation order. His son and friends say he has been singled out because he is a political activist. Jeannette Gabriel from the New Jersey Workers Democracy, another detainee support group, says that throughout the country, politically active immigrants have been singled out.

"In Cleveland, Chicago, upstate New York, in New York, political leaders are being detained. It's a pattern," she says.

According to his roommate Bernie McFall, Farouk is the self-proclaimed New York Representative of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He distributed the organization's newspaper, Al-Hourriyah, and "even to this day at his post office at Thompkins Square Station, a supply of this paper arrives."

Until three years ago DFLP was on the Department of State's list of terrorist organizations, and even though it was removed for lack of terrorist activities in 1999, it is still considered an extremist group.

"They are engaged in armed struggle. Any group that rejects the piece process and engages in violence has to be considered extremist," says Stephen Schwartz, a senior policy analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. "It is not as active as it used to be, but it carries organized attacks outside Israel."

Even though he organized and actively participated in rallies and demonstrations in New York, Farouk's criminal record in the United States is clear. Tarek Abdel-Muhti, a 24-year-old American citizen, says his father has "always tried to be a model citizen in this country and enjoy his Constitutional right." For a couple of weeks before he was arrested, Farouk even worked for the morning show at the New York radio station WBAI, commenting on Palestinian issues and providing contacts for Israeli and Palestinian sources.

Farouk has remained active while in prison, which is why, his supporters claim, he has been moved around to three detention centers. On October 29, he started a petition signed by 81 detainees at the Passaic County Jail, claiming their Constitutional rights have been denied.

Professor Benitez, however, does not think that the government is denying the detainees their Constitutional rights, including Farouk's. "He could say whatever he wants if he was an American citizen, but the difference with this gentleman is that he's saying these things and he's not here lawfully. An immigration judge decided that in 1995."

"I am willing to believe that the federal government does want to detain him because of his political views," he continues. "But it doesn't matter, because the federal government has an independent basis to detain him, and that's his immigration violation. It doesn't need political reasons."

Sipping tea in the living room, a free Shabaan laughs heartily when he hears Farouk's name. Of course he knows him. They met in Middlesex, where Farouk was detained before he was transferred to Camden, and then to Passaic. They always fought about politics, Farouk being an avid supporter of Castro and Nasser, and Shabaan trying to persuade him that they were "not good people."

"I kept telling him, Farouk, America is a good country, look at the jail—if we were in jail in our countries, we would have none of this! We would be chained to the wall!"

"But he kept saying, 'No, we are being treated here like the Japanese in 1941.' I tell him, Farouk, you're 58, you shouldn't blah-blah too much. If you hate America, why are you here?"

And flashing another of his wide, white smiles, Shabaan concludes: "I love America, it gave me everything. I built my life here. I got a house. My kids grew up here."

On October 31, Shabaan had his court hearing and the judge delivered good news—the family would have another hearing on February 1, 2003, a week after they round their tenth year of American life. Then, their lawyer will have legal grounds to ask for green cards for the couple, so they can live their dream. On the phone, Eman says she is very happy and hopeful. But her husband still doesn't understand—why does the Government have to keep the innocent people in jail?

Professor Benitez has the answer:

"The INS rationale is political. The federal government is not prepared to protect the United States from a terrorist attack. It was not prepared on September 11 and it is not prepared today. The bureaucratic nightmare that is the federal government knows that it does not have those things required to make the United States safe. But that's a very shocking statement for the President or the Attorney General to make. And Americans, for our sophistication, we like to hear from our leaders that nothing is going to happen here."

"So how can we keep people's mind off the fact that we cannot defend the country? Well, let's find someone to blame. Who can we blame? Let's blame aliens. They're easy to pick up. Let's blame aliens from Muslim countries -- they're easier to pick up. Let's implement the Absconder initiative, the Patriot Act. Let's make it harder for foreign students to come here. It's going to make people feel safer. That's the only thing the Government can do."

"The 19 hijackers were all Muslim, and they were all aliens. That's the only similarity they had. It's merely a smokescreen. Because we here in the United States don't want to hear the truth."

Part of the truth is that the post-911 detention sweeps affected hundreds of people whose only violation of the law was no more terrifying than overstaying their visas or violating a deportation order. They didn't steal, kill, or covet their neighbor's wife. They stayed in the country—illegally—because they liked it, because they had started to build a life here, because they were afraid to go back to their home countries. They paid taxes, and they worked hard to make a living. For the most part, these people were good citizens. Was ruining their lives worth it?

"If you need to hear things that rationally are not true just because you need to feel comfortable with yourself, it is worth it," says Professor Benitez. "But if you're a thinking person and recognize you are not safe, then it's not worth it. It is a waste of money to apprehend people who have nothing to do with terrorism."