Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
The immigration service's new registration plan is supposed to help fight terrorism. It's also locking people up without explanation.
Jan 23, 2003 | When the office computer at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) crashed during Mohsen Hashemi's interview on the afternoon of Dec. 16, 2002 -- two days after he'd first heard of a new program that, he thought, required him to register with the agency -- he was annoyed but unconcerned. He'd been a taxpaying Texan for the past 10 years, and he was not afraid to register. He was here legally, on "humanitarian parole" from Iran, and contributing to his community. The Italian restaurant he owned in Round Rock was small but surviving, and his daughters, 2 1/2 and 5, had been learning to speak Southern from birth. His wife, a Russian immigrant, had started studying for the U.S. citizenship exam that year. It was a good life, he thought, and he was grateful to the government who had allowed him to escape harm in Iran.
So when the INS told him it had grown close to closing time that day and he would have to come back on Dec. 19, he didn't mind. He minded a little more when the computer connection to D.C. went down on that second visit too and he was again told to make the hour-and-a-half drive to return. For a routine process, this was taking a long time, he thought, but he willingly complied. And although on his third visit the computer did not crash, everything else in his world did.
On Dec. 23, the San Antonio INS office revoked his humanitarian parole visa without explanation and led him away in handcuffs. That was the last his family heard of him for three days. He's been shuffled between INS-rented Texas jails ever since, though no one will tell him or his family why.
"Our lives have been torture one day at a time," said his brother Hassan in an interview. "He's never even gotten a speeding ticket. We don't understand why they haven't set bail or released him. I've been here 23 years, and I've gone through all the channels I can think of, and still no one will tell me why he's being detained."
Hashemi had gotten caught in the dragnet of the INS's Special Registration program -- a new initiative requiring foreign nationals from certain countries to annually report their whereabouts. While the Bush administration contends that the program is an essential tool in the war on terrorism, it has ignited yet another civil rights firestorm for the Ashcroft Justice Department -- and critics argue it may not even be an effective anti-terrorism tactic.
According to Babak Sotoodeh, president of the Alliance of Iranian Americans (AIA) and co-counsel for a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Iranian detainees, Hashemi should never have been held in the first place.
What's worse, one document on the INS Web site indicates that he may never even have had to register. Page 3 of "Questions and Answers (on Special Call-in Registration Procedures)" contains this passage: "What if I was paroled into the U.S.? Do I still have to register?" Response: "No. If your last entry into the U.S. was on or before September 10, 2002, for citizens or nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, and you were not inspected and admitted as a nonimmigrant, you are not subject to Special Registration."
There are hundreds of Hashemis, according to Sotoodeh, each detention a variation on the theme of confusion and fear. And if the U.S. government keeps adding new countries to the list requiring Special Registration -- as it did again last Thursday -- there may well be hundreds more.
While in principle Special Registration is a straightforward way of monitoring visitors from certain countries, in practice it has been plagued by controversy from the start. Civil rights groups cite bureaucratic snafus, lack of procedural standardization and poor public outreach as evidence of the program's failures.
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