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

by David K. Shipler

  The FBI began trying to find people it had been watching, taking along INS agents so that anyone out of status could be picked up on immigration charges. Immigration law became the handiest tool since it required no proof of wrongdoing except a person’s presence without documentation. That in turn sometimes resulted from clerical oversights, as in the case of Enayet Ullah and his family.

  He was caught as officials screened airport workers, a potentially sensible precaution dubbed Operation Tarmac. When Ullah’s name came up on a list of baggage handlers at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the immigration records showed an outstanding deportation order, one that he had never received, although he hadn’t changed addresses; he’d lived for years in the same ground-floor apartment in Brooklyn. Perhaps the ruling had been sent to his lawyer, who had failed to notify him—not an infrequent slip, and one that can get a removal order reversed for ineffective assistance of counsel.

  Ullah had applied for political asylum in 1994 after fleeing persecution as secretary of a pro-democracy party in Bangladesh, where he had been jailed and beaten for five days. A criminal case was begun against him there, so upon release he had gone into hiding; government thugs had visited his house, threatening to kidnap and kill his little daughter if his wife spoke against the ruling party. It seemed like a strong claim of persecution, and the U.S. embassy issued visas to the whole family, who departed in full view of the disorganized Bangladeshi bureaucracy, thanks to a relative employed at the airport in Dhaka.

  Yet no decision on his asylum petition had ever been reached by an American immigration judge, as far as he knew. Twice his immigration lawyer failed to show up for hearings, drawing a warning from the judge; finally, the attorney appeared and applied for an extension. “And after that, no answer,” Ullah said. “I told the lawyer, what can we do? We do not get any answer from the immigration office, what can we do? He said if you go over there, you’ll get deported. So you should do nothing, because they don’t say anything.”

  That may have been good advice in the 1990s, when the most dysfunctional agency in the federal government couldn’t keep track of its own decisions and the law went largely unenforced. By 2002, however, targeted pockets of efficiency had been created. One concentrated on immigrants working at airports.

  Before their carefully constructed lives started to be disassembled, the Ullahs could have been a poster family for a beneficent America. Instead of trying to be rid of them, a clever government could have touted them in the Muslim world as an exhibit of America’s virtue as a refuge, albeit a difficult one, for achieving, principled people courageous enough to uproot themselves from their own cultures and languages and professions, and begin again on alien soil.

  Gathered in their neat and comfortable apartment, they seemed so gentle, despite the time of high tension and uncertainty. Enayet Ullah, who sported a mustache and wore reading glasses, buried whatever anger he felt under a quiet sweetness. His wife, Razia Sultana, wore a cream-colored head scarf, marking her as an observant Muslim and drawing nervous glances after 9/11. “They’re afraid,” she said sadly. “People look at me like I did something. Sometimes they don’t even want to give me a seat.” To come here, she had taken a step down professionally, from lecturing in psychology at a Bangladeshi university to working for an accountant in New York—a typical compromise for educated immigrants. Occasionally, she descended into tears, softly, not harshly.

  Two of their three children were not in danger of deportation: their oldest daughter, Rahnuma, a student at Hunter College, because she was married to an American; and their youngest, a boy named Tasfiq, because he had been born in the United States and thus into American citizenship. Razia and the middle child, Tarnima, were as vulnerable to removal as their father, who was out on $15,000 bail.

  And what had this done to their opinions about America? A long silence settled on the room, and finally Rahnuma spoke: “I mean, at first, I mean, my dad came here for opportunity, for freedom.”

  “For safety,” he added.

  “But now, see, here we don’t have any safety,” said Rahnuma, “no freedom, actually.” Her clear English came in a thin, light lilt that made her sound as if she were smiling. She was not. “We are actually being judged because of our religion, like he did something wrong.”

  It had been a Tuesday in November 2002, her father’s day off from his job with a private contractor for United Airlines. The phone rang early in the morning, the manager calling to ask that he come to work immediately. Only later did his boss apologetically describe the scene: FBI and immigration agents bullying him into making the call, staying at his side while he did so, telling him that he could not leave the office until he reached their quarry—in other words, an illegal detention of the supervisor. “They watch him,” Ullah said. “They think if he go out, he can call me and tell me don’t come.”

  As Ullah rode up the escalator in Terminal 7, he saw at the top three men in plainclothes who had his picture. As he stepped off, one cuffed his wrists behind him. He was questioned for eight or nine hours and was not allowed to call anyone, neither his wife nor a lawyer.

  Razia was nagged by worry. She tried and tried his cell phone but could not reach him. Finally, around 3:00 p.m. a call came from his brother, who also worked at JFK, saying that he’d heard that Ullah had been taken by the FBI and immigration. “She fainted,” Rahnuma said of her mother. “I was there.” And then, “we actually left home” and hid in a friend’s house, she said, an old survival reflex from Bangladesh to avoid agents who might come looking for the rest of the family.

  For three months, much longer than he had been jailed in Bangladesh, he was held at a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was not brutalized, perhaps because the earlier abuse elsewhere had begun to gain publicity. His new attorney, Sin Yen Ling, then of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, got him out on bail, which was raised by five friends and relatives.

  Ullah went back to work while Ling revived his asylum application. Each morning, he headed out the door at 4:00 for the airport (where he was no longer allowed to cross through security), leaving Razia suspended in anxiety that when his shift was over at 1:00 p.m., he might not return. But he did return, and thanks to an old copy of his arrest warrant from Bangladesh, plus credible evidence of what he might face if he were sent back, Enayet Ullah and his family were ultimately granted political asylum in the United States of America. After failing, the system sometimes works.

  The frenzied efforts to ferret out potential terrorists rode on the latest episode of anti-immigration sentiment, a periodic feature of American history. The current aversion had gathered force in the early 1990s, propelling California voters to pass Proposition 187, which denied access to government benefits, even public schooling, to illegal immigrants and their children, including those who were citizens by virtue of being born in the United States. The ballot measure, later found unconstitutional, electrified politicians all the way up to President Clinton, who understood that he could not win a second term without California’s electoral votes.

  Clinton was a master at defusing the right by adopting some of its positions—on welfare reform, for example—so he did the same with immigration. He endorsed tougher deportation measures. He avoided even symbolic gestures of regard for the venerable process of acquiring American citizenship. “I tried the whole time I was at INS to get Clinton to a naturalization ceremony,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the immigration agency from 1993 through the end of his administration. The White House staff never agreed, she complained. “Isn’t that something?”46

  Then came the attacks of September 11 and a convenient confluence of fears—of terrorism and of immigrants. After years of scant enforcement, the immigration laws were suddenly mobilized like a weapon carelessly deployed, wounding the harmless along with the nefarious, causing untold collateral damage with unforeseen social costs.

  Like the Palmer Raids against foreign-born “anarchists” early in
the twentieth century, the Ashcroft Sweeps, early in the twenty-first, focused on entire groups, not just individuals. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had ordered the roundup of some 6,000 people, mostly immigrants, after a series of bombings in 1919 included an explosion on the porch of his house. Had the 2001 attacks occurred in that earlier age, before the society’s rising sensitivity to racial and ethnic profiling, wholesale internment of Muslims might have been accepted, as the confinement of ethnic Japanese had been during World War II. The preferred method now, a haphazard substitute of sweeps and raids, was more restrained but based on similar assumptions: cast the net for Muslim men, hold those in violation of immigration law, and a few guilty catches would inevitably be found. All nineteen hijackers were Muslims, after all, performing their atrocity in the name of a twisted notion of religious duty. All but three, however, were in the United States legally.

  The authorities singled out Muslims in various ways. Ashcroft issued a demand that males sixteen and older who were not permanent residents, from any of twenty-five heavily Muslim countries, present themselves to immigration offices to be fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned. The “special registration” requirement was short-lived, running from November 2002 to April 2003, producing no terrorists willing to show up and declare themselves. But in five months it worked considerable hardship on hapless illegals among the 83,000 who complied. Some 13,000 who were out of status, sometimes because of technical or clerical errors by the INS itself, were greeted at immigration offices with deportation orders, often handcuffs. Many disappeared into jails for months. Their families knew nothing except that they had never returned from their visits to officialdom, so officialdom became anathema.47

  Several thousand panicky, undocumented Pakistanis, the largest group of immigrants among the twenty-five, gave up on their American dreams and uprooted themselves from their homes, schools, jobs, and small businesses. They fled, either back to Pakistan or north to the border with Canada in search of asylum from the United States. When Canadian authorities couldn’t process them fast enough, they congregated in northern Vermont, cramming into churches and homes, sheltered by the Salvation Army, taking refuge in their own vehicles during the deep of winter. Some, given Canadian appointments a month later, were arrested when they returned without American visas to the U.S. side of the border.48

  They left behind decimated neighborhoods. Little Pakistan, along Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue, saw its vibrant street life wither, its crowded mosques and flourishing restaurants decline, some classroom desks stand empty, its Urdu-language newspaper lose most of its advertising.49

  The spasm of fear at the highest levels of government was mirrored by fear in the lowliest neighborhoods of immigrants. Women “come to us, their husbands are beating them, and we ask them if we can proceed with the law. They say, ‘No, no, I will be deported. I’m illegal, and I have children,’ ” reported Muhammad Tariqur Rahman, director of the Islamic Circle of North America in New York City. “Even legal immigrants robbed in the subway, they won’t go to the police because they think they’ll see them as a suspect.”

  These are not unfounded fantasies. When Rita Cote called police in Tavares, Florida, to help her Spanish-speaking sister in a domestic violence incident in 2009, the officers arrested Cote instead. She spoke with an accent and looked Latino, so they demanded her passport and found an old, undelivered administrative removal order from her childhood. She was locked up for several weeks, away from her husband and three young children, while the American Civil Liberties Union petitioned for her release, successfully in the end.50

  Some Muslims worried that the most innocent gatherings might be viewed as suspicious, so two New York taxi drivers from Pakistan stopped getting together with friends in Brooklyn to watch cricket matches on satellite television, lest a building superintendent report them.51 “The advice people give to each other is, if at odd times you hear a knock on the door, don’t open the door,” said Rashida Abdul-Hakim, a caseworker for the Islamic Circle. None of this was irrational, since ludicrous tips were aggressively investigated and arrests were routinely performed between midnight and five in the morning, when agents figured their quarry would be home. The crackdown sharpened the edge of vulnerability, and many immigrants grew less willing to complain about exploitative landlords who charged high rents and employers who paid low wages.

  As always in America, though, opposites coexisted: alienation and assimilation, anxiety and pride. One March day as crisp and clear as September 11, I happened on a funeral at a mosque in Queens where the pulse of fear became a weak counterpoint to a show of patriotism.

  The street was closed by police cars with lights flashing, led by a ranking officer with gold braid and a plainclothesman with an earphone. A large crowd of men spilled across the street outside the mosque. American and U.S. Army flags were fluttering above the green of army uniforms, a hearse parked at the curb.

  Six soldier pallbearers marched in quickstep to the back of the hearse, and a Muslim flag was placed on the coffin, which they carried into the mosque. Inside was the body of Azhar Ali, a national guardsman killed in Iraq, a young Muslim dying for America’s cause. The face of his mother, who was robed in black, was the color of ash. “Please pray so we do not have to say another prayer, and another,” intoned the imam after prayers for the dead. “Thank you all for showing your patriotism and coming.” He concluded, “May Allah bless America.”

  UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  It’s a safe bet that the legislators who fashioned the rules of deportation, and the officials who enforced them zealously after 9/11, did not mean to deter abused wives from calling the police for protection against their violent husbands, or to break up families by deporting a parent who leaves a spouse and children behind. Surely they didn’t intend to create a humiliating spectacle in northern Vermont, which probably undermined American moral authority in the Muslim world more effectively than any al-Qaeda propaganda. Against this tide of anxiety, FBI officials struggled constantly to keep open communications lines with immigrant communities, meeting frequently in public forums to hear concerns and explain policies, even while their undercover agents were infiltrating worship services and deploying informants with hidden recording devices.

  Among the most devastating results of the deportation assault has been the scattering of family members. It’s been too much of a hardship for one deported member to pull the rest out of their American lives, and spouses and children have often stayed in the country after the “alien” is “removed.” Berly Feliz, here illegally, went innocently to an immigration office to renew her work permit and was handcuffed and flown back to Honduras with no chance to say good-bye to her husband and eight-year-old daughter, both American citizens, left behind in the Bronx.52

  Hassan Raiss of Morocco was forcibly separated from his American wife after he neglected to notify immigration authorities when he moved. Early in the 1990s, such a minor infraction had not usually been punished, said his lawyer, Lawrence Gatei. This was partly because “processing change-of-address forms is one of the lower-priority tasks,” which didn’t always get done, according to Doris Meissner, who headed the INS under Clinton. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, however, the benefit of the doubt was rarely given.

  Raiss’s oversight created a snowballing series of violations: First, when his wife was too ill to attend his green-card interview, as required, the interview was rescheduled, but the notice of the next appointment was sent to his old address and returned, prompting the authorities to launch deportation proceedings. A subsequent order to appear before an immigration judge never reached him, and his removal was ordered in absentia. He achieved a serious-sounding new status: “fugitive alien.”

  Then came bizarre deception, which often characterizes immigration arrests. Authorities worry that if potential deportees know what’s about to happen, they’ll run and melt into immigrant communities. ICE recruited Detective Andrea Purcell of the Massachusetts Bay Transporta
tion Authority Police, who visited Raiss’s house and left her number. He called her when he got home, according to Gatei’s account. She said that someone had used his car for unlawful activity. “He said, ‘Wait a second, I sold that car in May.’ She said, ‘Do you have a receipt for selling the car?’ ‘I have it here. Would you like to see it?’ ‘Yes, I’d like to see it.’ ”

  He wanted to contact his lawyer first, but she assured him that he didn’t need one and urged him to come with the documents. “The next day she went to his house, but she didn’t find him,” Gatei said. “She left a message saying she was there, for him to contact her. She went to the hotel where he worked, but he had left for the day.”

  Although Gatei was skeptical about Detective Purcell’s story, she promised the lawyer by phone that nothing more was involved. So he accompanied Raiss to the police station, car receipt in hand. The detective met them, excused herself immediately, then quickly reappeared with two ICE agents, who made the arrest.

  The exasperated lawyer felt used. He also thought this was a gross misuse of transit police. “Every day we’re hearing of women riders being assaulted,” he said, “and they have detectives running all over enforcing federal mandates? And they’re not even trained to do that.” He complained to the chief of the transit police, who admitted that lying to an attorney was “improper” and declared that enforcing immigration law “is generally best left to the federal agencies established for that purpose.”53