Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (Vintage)

by David K. Shipler

  It seems reasonable to imagine many such waivers being granted if the law allowed them for slightly more serious crimes, if the government provided attorneys for the immigrants, and if the country accepted the concept that once someone has “paid his debt to society” for a criminal act, he should not be punished again, with banishment. Understandably, we do not like sex offenders or drug users or thieves, but we also believe in redemption.

  ORPHANED

  Because her father was thrown from his motorcycle and killed when she was four, Dr. Waheeda Mani Tehseen considered herself an orphan. Her mother, struggling with six children in the North-West Frontier area of Pakistan, taught school for $5 a month and wrenched a hard living from the ground. “We had animals, we had buffaloes,” said Dr. Tehseen. “We used to sell them, and we sold chicken eggs. We grew vegetables in our backyard and sold vegetables.” She did not say this with the melodic pride of having risen out of destitution to the heights of education and accomplishment. She said it in a minor key of sadness—perhaps because she had now fallen so far.

  In an unlucky coincidence, she spent her childhood in the town of Nowshera, near Afghanistan, a tribal region where the Taliban and al-Qaeda established themselves decades later. Mani (as her friends call her) learned multiple languages of the region and the world: Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, English, and Arabic. Her mother prodded her to college in Peshawar, and from 1983 to 1985 she taught high school at Landi Kotal in Khyber, where her first job every morning “was to collect all the guns from the children, put them in a closet, and lock it,” she said. “I had tags for all the guns.”

  In 1988 she received a scholarship for graduate study at the University of Illinois. She came on a student visa, her husband and three children followed, and in 1993 she earned her Ph.D. in toxicology after winning a grant from the National Science Foundation for a “difficult and ambitious project to characterize pollutants along a large stretch of a river in Pakistan,” according to one of her professors.27

  Her husband belonged to a minority sect of Islam, the Ahmadis, who in Pakistan are considered non-Muslim heretics, often persecuted and physically attacked. So he applied for and was granted asylum, along with his family. Ahmadis have been killed in recent spasms of Taliban violence (ninety-five were slaughtered in two mosques in 2010), but outright government oppression has been episodic, allowing him to return periodically to Pakistan without consequence.28

  Mani made a solid professional life for herself in America, even while hardship hit her family. Their fourth child, Manahil Chohan, who was born in the United States, has been impaired by benign brain tumors. The next older, Warda Chohan, is mentally retarded.29 Their schooling required attentive monitoring, and because Mani’s husband worked only sporadically, the burden of providing support fell mainly to her.

  She was employed as a toxicologist for five years at the Illinois state Environmental Protection Agency, but lost her position after she overstayed a fifteen-day leave to care for her ill mother in Pakistan. Getting fired was frightening. “I was the only breadwinner in my home,” she said. “I was desperate to get a job.” So she applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was interviewed on the phone, and was so delighted to be hired that she made her first mistake.

  She either did not read or did not understand or did not want to grasp a key condition of her new job. After moving her family to a Virginia suburb outside Washington, D.C., in 1998, she went to work reviewing tests of pesticides on animals to determine appropriate conditions of the chemicals’ use—the maximum quantities, the minimum waiting times between application and harvest, and other restrictions to avoid harm to humans or livestock. A week into her employment, the human resources department gave her the usual forms, which mentioned that anyone filling her position had to be an American citizen. She was not. She held a green card signifying her permanent residency, which had put her on a path to naturalization as a citizen. “I may be a Ph.D. in toxicology, but I am not a Ph.D. in immigration,” she explained. “I wasn’t clear that it was a green-card requirement or a citizenship requirement. I was hired, and the pay was double.” So when the papers asked about her citizenship, “I lied,” she admitted, “but I didn’t think it was a heinous crime.”

  Six days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, she applied for naturalization. The form is demanding enough that immigration specialists often recommend that an applicant consult an attorney in filling it out. Mani did not. Her husband completed it as he applied for himself and their daughter Warda, she contended, and she signed it without reading it—the second mistake, a fateful one. Where the form asked for her work experience and her current employer, the EPA was omitted. Where the application asked, “Have you ever claimed to be a U.S. citizen (in writing or any other way)?,” an X was placed in the box marked “No.” The signature panel contained a warning that the questions were answered “under penalty of perjury,” and later she swore to her answers in a personal interview. Officials had no reason to doubt her, and she became a citizen the following year.30

  As Mani tells her story, the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 swept her back to the traumas of her early life. “The news really hurt me,” she recalled, especially pictures of women and children fleeing across the border into Pakistan. “I stopped watching the news because it triggered my childhood. People just can’t imagine what would happen to a woman if she becomes widowed. She would have to go to the street for a piece of bread, into the garbage for food.” So Mani felt driven to help.

  In November she took $4,000 or $5,000 of her own money to Chaman, across the frontier from Kandahar. Her brother-in-law, a senior Pakistani army officer, obtained 1,000 blankets and 500 sweaters at discounts from a factory and delivered them in army trucks. “Refugees were coming,” she said. “They were wounded, they were sick.” There was chaos. “It really hurt in my heart to see all the children crying, the women. You can do this only if your heart is triggered.”

  Back home, she campaigned for contributions at the EPA and elsewhere. She left a container in her open garage so people could fill it with used clothing, and took the donations three or four times to the border regions. She established a charity called Help Orphans and Widows; obtained nonprofit status from the IRS; and created a vocational institute in a refugee camp where widows and orphaned girls were taught sewing, carpet weaving, and other crafts. “I bought 2,000 clay pitchers. I bought sweaters and basic food items: flour, oil, tea, sugar, rice, lentils—dry food items—and some medicines, rehydration, painkillers.” The EPA gave her its Unsung Hero Award “for providing care, funds, and needed articles through your own resources and contacts to isolated refugee camps often not reached by international aid groups.”31

  Eager to expand the assistance, “I was looking for a bigger Muslim organization to put up money,” she said, so she rented a booth at an Islamic convention in the United States. Trolling for help, she happened upon a display by the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), whose representative “got very sympathetic,” then visited her booth and promised to talk to his director. This struck her as a hopeful prospect, but it set in motion a chain of misery. IARA was a Khartoum-based organization with a U.S. office in Columbia, Missouri, run by a Sudanese-American, Mubarak Hamed. He called Mani later, not with an offer of financing, but with a proposal that she facilitate the creation of an orphanage for boys. IARA would send the money directly to its sister organization in Peshawar.

  Unbeknownst to Mani, IARA was already under investigation by the FBI for possibly funding organizations involved in terrorism. It was not yet listed as a terrorist group by the Treasury Department, but it was under surveillance, whether through ordinary criminal wiretap warrants or the more flexible orders that could be obtained secretly through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or, possibly, the warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency authorized by President Bush. Later, Mani also came to suspect that the FBI had been called by a new manager at the EPA, upset that she was
taking so much accumulated leave to travel to Pakistan. However it happened, she appeared on the radar as she organized the orphanage. IARA had given her names of Pakistanis who could help, and she called them. “I had no clue who these people were,” she said. “Even IARA didn’t know these people. They knew the people in Peshawar, didn’t know the field people.”

  The building chosen for the orphanage had been abandoned by its owner, a common occurrence in that turbulent region. Mani understood well how others simply moved in and took over such abandoned property, but she worried that “I open up the orphanage and people come [back] and it’s a rough culture. If we spend money, they could come kick us out.” So she asked questions on the phone: “To whom does this building belong?” The FBI was listening.32

  What they allegedly heard was the name Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. It was not a name that Mani knew, and it may seem naive now, looking back, that she thought only about the durability of the lease, not about terrorism. Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister, led a mujahideen faction that had helped to defeat Soviet forces with U.S. assistance. But the fickle alliances had shifted, and by 2003 his affiliation with the Taliban and his alleged support of al-Qaeda got him listed as a terrorist by the State Department. In the late 1970s, with a land grant from Pakistan, he had founded Shamshatu refugee camp, which contained the building in question.33 There is no evidence that he was in the area when the orphanage was established or that he received any money from IARA. But the possibility evidently excited FBI investigators.

  They opened a quiet investigation of Mani. “Initially, I think they thought I was affiliated with terrorists, which is completely false, 100 percent false,” she declared. “They talked to my professors,” she learned later. “Everybody gave very good, positive, extremely good information, and they could not find any flaw in my life, not in money, credit cards.” The one thing they found was her lie on the EPA documents and, consequently, on the citizenship application. In the law, the transgression is classified as naturalization fraud.

  It’s not difficult to imagine FBI agents’ glee in discovering this hook, this opening to extract information and cooperation. Immigrants are especially vulnerable, even after they have been naturalized as U.S. citizens, for their citizenship can be taken away by a judge if they have lied to acquire it.

  Once agents had this leverage, they wanted more, it seemed. Their instrument came as a stranger calling herself Amanda Davis. She phoned Mani with an enticing story that her grandmother had left money to be donated to worthy causes, and asked to visit Mani to talk about her work in Pakistan. Several times Davis came to her home, looked around, once took her to lunch, and discussed the newly established orphanage housing two hundred boys. “She kept asking me, ‘When are you going to go back again?,’ and I told her probably after a couple of months.” Davis offered to give Mani $10,000.

  Whatever the scheme in preparation, it went awry when Mani decided to fly on short notice to Pakistan to see her husband, who had traveled there amid marital difficulties. Only at the last minute did she remember her promise to let the putative donor know when she was going. “I called Amanda Davis and told her I was leaving today,” Mani recalled. “She said what time. And I said in one hour. And she panicked. I think the plan was to catch me red-handed. She vanished. During the questions, they asked who is Amanda Davis, and I said I don’t know her well. And they smiled a little bit, so I think she was their person.”

  A sting might not have worked anyway. On the one hand, Mani did not know the U.S. law: if you’re carrying $10,000 or more, you must declare it to customs as you leave or enter the country, then you may take it after a record is made. On the other hand, she knew the law of survival in Pakistan: even if Davis had managed to get the cash to her in time, Mani wouldn’t have flown out with it. “I would be the last person, knowing my country, to take $10,000 to Pakistan on my body,” she said. “People shoot you dead for $1,000.”

  The authorities were ready for Mani nonetheless, and when she arrived at the airport and put her passport on the check-in counter, two agents arrested her for naturalization fraud. “I was shocked,” she said, and was certain “that there was some misunderstanding.” They searched her thoroughly and seemed surprised not to find the money. For three or four days she was locked in a cell the size of a small bathroom, a terrifying time that became the pivot point of all that she later sought to avoid.

  They also got a search warrant for her house, carried away many boxes of documents, and peppered her with additional threats: about some unspecified errors in her mortgage application, about what they claimed were counterfeit labels on clothing her brother had brought her from Pakistan. The possible charges were piling up.

  It soon became clear that the FBI wanted her “cooperation,” an elastic word in law enforcement that can mean anything from tightly focused testimony to a long-term role as an informant. “I was under the impression that they wanted to make me a spy,” she said. She knew the tribal areas, after all, could blend in, spoke all those languages. She imagined that the authorities had something like that in mind, although they never got far enough with her to say so explicitly.

  If federal officials considered making expansive use of her skills, they were less than adroit. “Total dumb people come into these jobs,” Mani declared, “not knowing anything and having preconceptions in their head, and will do anything to get ahead.” The real help they needed from her, she thought, was an education on Pakistan. “They didn’t understand me at that time, and I didn’t understand them. Whenever they asked me any questions, truthfully whatever I knew I told them. But in their perspective I was not telling them everything and I was hiding something from them. In their mind I was related to some big terrorism and I could go to those areas, and being a woman, I could do a lot for them.”

  The government did not seem to know how to woo her. Instead, it ratcheted up the pressure. She was threatened with prison time for her naturalization fraud, which carried a maximum of ten years.34 The FBI stationed a vehicle ostentatiously in front of her house, not for stealthy surveillance (it was in plain view), but to compound her stress. The phone at home would ring day and night, and when she picked it up, she heard only silence. “Since I was scared, I was an easy target for them,” she said, and recounted the threats: “OK, if you don’t cooperate, we will make another case regarding your mortgage, a case against your son—so they kept making all kinds of stories of what they would do.” Her son was nineteen. “They take him out from his college and took him out for two or three hours for investigation,” she said. “He was a child, and he was very scared. They were telling him to push me, if you cooperate with us and tell your mother to cooperate with us—otherwise we will make a case against you about some money.”

  She lost her job at the EPA, although she was warmly praised by the supervisor who had hired her. Her health deteriorated, both physically and mentally, as documented by a thick file of medical records provided later to the court. “I was under eight medications,” she said. “I had high blood pressure, anxiety problem.” She was losing her memory, her ability to concentrate. “I was on high doses of so many medications, sleeping pills, panic attacks, attention deficit disorders.” Diagnosed with depression, she was so “fragile,” said one professional who dealt with her case, that she could not have survived prison. And it was avoiding prison that became her obsession. “I think I was the most terrorized person—by them,” she declared.

  Yet the bullying did not work, not immediately. Her lead prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. Morton, suggested in writing that her “assistance” might include providing information on relatives, which she understood to mean her husband, whose occasional return to Pakistan had raised officials’ suspicions about his asylum claim. Morton wanted her “to answer questions that I or agents assisting me wish to pose her concerning her activities and those of her family and associates over the past few years.”35

  When asked to testify against IARA, she worried tha
t she would be damaging innocents, so she hesitated and then refused. What she would have gained from cooperating was unclear. She would not have been able to save her American citizenship—Morton would get her “denaturalized” anyway because of the false statements in her citizenship application. Nor did she remember being promised that she would be allowed to stay in the United States—she would be deported, sooner or later. This is confirmed in a letter from Morton to her lawyer, which offers only that her removal could be “non-custodial” (read: no jail or handcuffs) and could be postponed as long as the government needed her cooperation. No possibility of permanent residency was raised.36

  The government seemed to be toying with her, requiring her commitment and giving none of its own, which is typical in such matters. “Assistance” was nebulous, and the consequences of providing or withholding it were equally vague. Perhaps she would have prevailed at a trial, given the minor nature of the falsehood on her application, but Morton gave no ground to sympathy or proportion, and going to trial seemed too risky for a woman too vulnerable to go to jail. Her lawyer negotiated a guilty plea with no prison time, but with an acute punishment nonetheless. She was stripped of her citizenship and deported, which drove a wedge of nearly half a world between her and her young adult children, who remained in the United States as American citizens.37

  She dared not take Warda, her retarded teenage daughter, with her to Pakistan. “In Pakistan people believe in superstitions and in most cases the mentally retarded people are considered being possessed by the evil ghost,” wrote Dr. Riffat A. Chaudhary, head of the psychiatry department at the National Institute for Handicapped in Lahore. “Often such patients are taken to the ghost doctors and the treatment … is so torturous, inhuman and horrible.… The mentally retarded patient is tied with the tree, beaten with the whip, lighting of fire around him and engulfing him in smoke.… Mentally retarded females are often abducted, raped, and murdered. If Warda Chohan return to Pakistan, she is likely to face the same fate.… It will adversely affect her personality and it may shorten her life too.”38 So Warda stayed in the United States with her older brother and sister.