Civil Liberties Update
From National immigration Forum

Translation to Arabic | Translation to most European Languages

1) CLINIC Press Release on 9/11 Commission Report

"With the 9/11 Commission recently concluding that aggressive U.S. immigration policies have done little in obtaining information regarding potential terrorist activities - citing four specific measures as ineffective - the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) calls for further evaluation of counter-terrorism initiatives that focus on immigrants."

Download the Full Report: Press Release (Word) Report (PDF)

2) Advocates Meet with DHS Inspector General

Advocates met with DHS IG Clark Kent Ervin and from his staff Elizabeth Redman, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations; Robert Ashbaugh, Assistant IG for Inspections, Evaluations, and Special Reviews; and Rick Reback, General Counsel to the IG on April 23, 2004. AIG Redman reported that currently, the OIG has 53 cases open for investigation. These cases include allegations of rapes by detention officers; assaults in detention facilities; among others. Since they began their work in March 2003 they have investigated 81 cases of which the 53 are still open. From December through April, 45 complaints were referred to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (OCRCL). Importantly, OCRCL investigates complaints that are outside the jurisdiction of OIG or another federal agency, but may still warrant review. Other topics discussed were public education and outreach; relationship between OIG and other units; staffing/resources; post 9/11 detentions; and OIG's inspections/audit role; among others. For more detailed notes from this meeting, please e-mail me ssivaprasad@immigrationforum.org.

3) Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments on Enemy Combatants

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the issue of whether the Administration can indefinitely hold U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants." Below are some resources:

ACLU Press Release: "ACLU Challenges the Bush Administration's Unilateral Authority to Define Citizens as Enemy Combatants and Detain Them Indefinitely"
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=15546&c=206

Watching Justice, (a project of the Open Society Institute) "Opinion Pages Weigh In On Enemy Combatant Cases" http://www.watchingjustice.org/whatsnew/whatsnew.php?docId=217

Washington Post, "Citizens and Enemies," April 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54875-2004Apr29.html

CQ Homeland Security, Courts & Justice, "Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Americans Held as 'Enemy Combatants'"
By Chris Logan, April 28, 2004

A lawyer for a U.S. citizen being held as an "enemy combatant" argued before the Supreme Court Wednesday that President Bush overstepped his authority by jailing Americans and denying them access to lawyers or the courts, the Associated Press reported.

Jennifer Martinez is representing Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on suspicion of being involved in an al Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" inside the United States. He is being held at a Navy brig in South Carolina, and until recently had not been granted access to his lawyer.

According to the AP, Martinez told the court, "Never before in history has this court granted the president a blank check to do whatever he wants to American citizens."
Frank Dunham, a lawyer for Yaser Esam Hamdi, the other U.S. citizen being held as an enemy combatant, reportedly told the court, "We could have people locked up all over the country tomorrow, with no opportunity to be heard. . . . Congress didn't intend for widespread, indefinite detentions."

Hamdi is the U.S.-born son of a Saudi oil worker. He was captured in Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and, like Padilla, until recently was denied access to his lawyers or the courts.

Bush administration lawyer Paul Clement argued that Congress gave the administration broad leeway in fighting terrorists at home and abroad, the AP said. And Clement added, "It has been well-established, and long-established, that the government has the authority to hold unlawful enemy combatants . . . in order to prevent them from returning to the field of battle," the AP said.

4) Resources and Articles of Interest (4)

Report on Civil Rights Implications of 9-11 Policies in New York: The New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. commission on Civil Rights announced its report: "Civil Rights Implications of Post-September 11 Law Enforcement Practices in New York" http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/sac/ny0304/ny0304.pdf

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Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report on Immigration Detention: "Immigration-Related Detention: Current Legislative Issues" (from Report) "The attacks of September 11, 2001, have increased interest in the authority under statute to detain noncitizens (aliens) in the United States. Under the law there is broad authority to detain aliens while awaiting a determination of whether the noncitizen should be removed from the United States. …As of March, for FY2004, on an average day, 22,812 noncitizens were in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detention." (Report Attached)

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Council on American Islamic Relations, "Unpatriotic Acts," "The Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) report - the only annual study of its kind - outlines 1019 incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2003, the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever recorded by the Washington-based group. According to the report, called "Unpatriotic Acts," hate crimes alone jumped by an unprecedented 121 percent." Executive Summary: http://www.cair-net.org/asp/execsum2004.asp

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New York Times, "2 Men Charge Abuse in Arrests After 9/11 Terror Attack,"
By Nina Bernstein, May 3, 2004

Before the World Trade Center attack, Javaid Iqbal was a Pakistani immigrant proud to be known as "the cable guy" to customers on Long Island, where he had lived for a decade and married an American. Ehab Elmaghraby, an Egyptian, had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway and a restaurant near Times Square where friendly police officers would joke, "Where's my shish kebab?"

But within weeks of Sept. 11, 2001, both had been picked up by federal agents in an anti-terror sweep. For 23 hours a day, they were locked in solitary confinement in the harsh maximum-security unit of a federal detention center in Brooklyn - the one cited by the Justice Department's inspector general last year for widespread physical abuse of its detainees.

The inspector general mentioned no specific names and cases, but now, in a federal lawsuit to be filed today and in telephone interviews from Pakistan and Egypt, the former cable technician and the former restaurateur have provided the most detailed personal accounts yet of the unit's brutality and the first to accuse specific corrections officers and wardens of abuse. The accusations are similar to those now being made against military officers guarding prisoners in Iraq.

The lawsuit charges that the men were repeatedly slammed into walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as "terrorists" and "Muslim bastards," and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one during which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.

At that point, the papers charge, he was confined without blankets, mattress or toilet paper to a tiny cell kept lighted 24 hours a day, and was denied adequate medical care or communication with his public defender. He said his attempts to pray or sleep were disrupted by guards banging on his door.

"I was in life and I went to hell," Mr. Elmaghraby, 37, said in the interview. He spent almost a year in the special unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where the detention and treatment of hundreds of Muslim immigrants have since become the focus of concerns about the constitutionality of the Justice Department's counterterrorism offensive.

Mr. Elmaghraby was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his Muslim landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord had applied for pilot training. Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the trade towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services. He was detained for nine months before the F.B.I. cleared him of any terrorist link.

Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal eventually pleaded guilty to minor federal criminal charges unrelated to terrorism - Mr. Elmaghraby to credit card fraud, Mr. Iqbal to having false papers and bogus checks - but they maintain now that they did so only to escape the abuse. They were deported after serving prison terms.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Traci Billingsley, said she could not comment on their lawsuit, which names as defendants Attorney General John Ashcroft; Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the former head of the Bureau of Prisons; Michael Zenk, the warden of the detention center; more than a dozen correction officers and supervisors; and a jail doctor.

Ms. Billingsley added that the bureau recently began an investigation to follow up evidence compiled by the inspector general against as many as 20 staff members and was now "trying to build a case that will withstand scrutiny in an administrative hearing or judicial proceeding."

Though the lawsuit is not being filed as a class action, it is about more than redress for the mistreatment of two individuals singled out because of their race, religion and national origin, said Alexander Reinert, a lawyer for Koob & Magoolaghan, which joined with the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy organization, to prepare the papers.

"The case is about ensuring that in times of crisis we stand by the principles that are most important to our country, and those are principles of fairness and equality embodied in the Constitution," he said.

Mr. Iqbal, 37, who lost 40 pounds in detention, said he suffers from chronic digestive problems, pain and depression and is still struggling to reconcile the two sides of America he experienced.

In a telephone interview from Faisalabad, Pakistan, he spoke wistfully of his early, around-the-clock jobs as a 7-Eleven clerk and as a gas station attendant in Huntington, N.Y., where customers brought him Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas gifts. But he is so haunted by memories of the terror, pain and humiliation that the federal officers inflicted on him, he said, that he starts to shake at the sight of his own brother, a policeman, in uniform.

"Before I go to prison, the America that I know is a beautiful country and Americans are such beautiful, kind, humble people," he said. "When I go to prison, I see there a different face of the United States of America."

His introduction to the nation's new detention policy was abrupt. Unlike Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent his whole detention in the maximum-security unit, Mr. Iqbal was housed with the general inmate population for the first two months after his arrest. But on the evening of Jan. 8, 2002, he was told that he had a "legal visit" in a room on another floor.

Instead of a lawyer, he found more than a dozen federal officers waiting for him. As he and the lawsuit tell it, several officers picked him up and threw him against the wall. He said he heard one ask a senior person, "He's the one?" and when the reply was affirmative, an officer pressing Mr. Iqbal's head into the wall turned it around, looked him in the face and said, "Welcome to hell, buddy."

At that, he was dragged to the floor, kicked in the stomach with steel-toed shoes and punched in the face, he said, and the officers screamed death threats and curses as they beat him up. "Then the senior person said, 'Just take him out of my sight.' "

Hatred seemed to determine the rules on the unit in ways large and small, the men said. On cold days when it rained, Mr. Iqbal was left outside for hours without jacket or shoes. When he was returned to his cell drenched, officers turned on the air-conditioning, he said. At one point, the lawsuit said, Mr. Elmaghraby was mockingly displayed naked to a female staff member.

The inspector general's report said last June that Mr. Ashcroft's policy was to hold detainees on any legal pretext until the F.B.I. cleared them, even though such clearances turned out to take months, not days, because they were given low priority. It said little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and the many people picked up by chance during the investigation.

To the plaintiffs, the unit seemed to erase their American lives. Mr. Elmaghraby says his wife, Pilar Valerio, an American citizen of Dominican background, left him after being threatened with arrest by an F.B.I. agent when she arrived at his first court hearing. Mr. Iqbal had been separated after 4‡ years of marriage at the time he was detained but had three American stepchildren. The eldest, Paul Harrison, 22, said, "I never knew what happened," when contacted by a reporter. "I felt like he fell off the face of the earth."

When the inspector general's investigators interviewed corrections officers, all but one or two denied that any detainees were abused. But according to a supplemental report issued in December, investigators later recovered videotapes that showed some of the same officers engaging in abuse.

Ms. Billingsley, the Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman, said it had taken no disciplinary action while it waited for a decision about prosecution to be made by the Department of Justice's civil rights division and the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. "We were recently advised of the decision not to prosecute," she said.

Mr. Iqbal said he was not looking for revenge. "Then there will be no difference between them and us," he explained. "They should just apologize in front of all the people of the United States of America who love freedom and justice. And they should apologize to each of us personally."