Mass Arrests Of Muslim
Foreigners In
CA
By
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
The Independent -
UK
12-21-2
- Hundreds of Middle Eastern and North African men, some
just 16, have been hauled into custody across southern California in the
past few days, enraging civil liberties groups and drawing comparisons
with the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during
the Second World War.
-
- The round-ups in Los Angeles, San Diego and suburban
Orange County were part of a counter-terrorism initiative by the Bush
administration, requiring men and teenagers from specific countries to
register with the immigration authorities and have their fingerprints
taken. Several thousand citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan -
many of them accompanied by lawyers - willingly came forward across
southern California to meet Monday's deadline.
-
- However, as many as a quarter of them - estimates vary
between 500 and 1,000 people - were arrested on the basis of apparently
minor visa violations and herded into jail cells under threat of
deportation.
-
- Lawyers reported that some detainees were forced to
stand up all night for lack of room, that some were placed in shackles,
and others were hosed down with cold water before being thrown into
unheated cells. They said the numbers were so high that authorities were
talking about transferring several hundred detainees to Arizona to await
immigration hearings and deportation orders.
-
- Both the lawyers and the southern California chapter
of the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the round-up as an
outrage that did not advance the fight against terrorism one inch and
very possibly hindered it. At a public demonstration in Los Angeles on
Wednesday, at least 3,000 protesters waved signs saying "What next?
Concentration camps?" and "Detain terrorists, not innocent
immigrants".
-
- "All of our fundamental civil rights have been
violated by these actions," one lawyer, Ban al-Wardi, told the Los
Angeles Times after 14 of her 20 clients were arrested during the
registration process. "I don't know how far this is going to go before
people start speaking up. This is a very dangerous precedent we are
setting. What's to stop Americans from being treated like this when they
travel overseas?"
-
- In one case, a 16-year-old boy was ripped from his
mother's arms and told he would never return home. The mother is a legal
resident married to an American citizen. Many of the detainees came from
Los Angeles' large Iranian Jewish population and are highly unlikely to
have any link to militant Islamic guerrilla groups.
-
- Immigration officials said they would not discuss
numbers but did not dispute one report putting the number of detainees
at between 500 and 700. They acknowledged anyone with a slight visa
irregularity was subject to arrest, regardless of personal histories.
The detainees' lawyers challenged the government to produce any evidence
of criminal behaviour among their clients, let alone a link to
international terrorist groups.
-
- The registration scheme was conceived by President
Bush's ultra-conservative Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and had
already come under criticism for what opponents call blatant
discrimination.
-
- � 2002 Independent Digital (UK)
Ltd
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The Mulindwas
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