January 1, 2003

By Camille T. Taiara

OMID, A 42-year-old South Bay real estate developer, has just visited his brother in Immigration and Naturalization Service detention at a Sacramento jail, and he's worried. His brother, Bijan (not his real name), is disabled as a result of childhood polio and walks on crutches. He also suffers from high blood pressure and a recent shoulder fracture that's been slow to heal. Yet Bijan's jailers, Omid says, denied him access to his medication for three days. "He's very weak," Omid tells us. "Emotionally, he was in very poor condition."

Bijan is one of hundreds of mostly Middle Eastern men in California swept up this month by the INS in the first phase of a selectively enforced federal fingerprinting, photographing, and registration program for immigrants who entered the country with temporary visas. The 44-year-old architect came to the United States from his native Iran in 1978 but fell "out of status" about a year and a half ago after the INS lost his permanent-residency application, Omid says. Bijan was detained when he reported to the San Jose INS office Dec. 16, the registration deadline for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan.

While most of those detained in Los Angeles were released within a few days, many of their Bay Area counterparts are still behind bars. Critics fault the INS for being unprepared to carry out the program and for lacking a comprehensive plan for processing all of the immigrants required to participate. In addition, they say, the detentions will only impair the Bush administration's dubious effort to identify potential terrorists, as fewer immigrants are likely to cooperate with the INS during the next round of registrations, in January, for fear of being detained.

In the meantime, the detentions are putting more strain on already overrun INS detention centers. Detainees are being packed into standing-room-only cells, aren't being provided with blankets or adequate amounts of food and water, and are constantly being moved from one location to another due to the lack of space, according to relatives and attorneys. Whereas INS officers in Los Angeles set bond for detainees during the intake process, the INS in San Francisco and San Jose took people into custody without setting bail, explains Saeed Ghaffari, an immigration lawyer assisting Bijan and several other Bay Area detainees. As a result, detainees must wait up to two weeks for their bond hearings.

Farhad (not his real name), a 37-year-old regional manager of a restaurant chain who, like Bijan, also came to the United States in 1978, was detained at the San Jose INS office Dec. 18. By the next day, says his sister, Farideh Tahvildari, he had been moved from San Jose to San Francisco and then flown to Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles before arriving in San Diego. "They shackled them together by their hands and feet," she says. "They won't let them sleep more than three or four hours a day – they keep moving them around.... They're in an 8-by-12-foot cell with 14 people."

According to Ghaffari and Tahvildari, many of the detainees are doctors or businessmen. The vast majority have no criminal record, have lived here most of their lives, and were probably eligible for permanent residency at one point or another but either neglected to follow through with the paperwork or fell out of status due to a bureaucratic snafu at the INS, Ghaffari says.

"These are people who have been here for a long time," he says. "They're [professionals]. They have families; they have strong ties to the community. They are people who are homeowners. And for some reason or another their immigration status ... fell through the cracks.... If somebody voluntarily came to your office, serve them with the papers to go to court. You've got their address, you know where they work – they came to you with the information. Give them the time and the date that they have to report to court and let the court handle the rest of the matter."

The mass detentions have led some to believe a more sinister goal lies behind the program, part of the U.S. National Security Entry-Exit Registration System enacted by the State Department last June. "There is no alarmism in saying this is a round-up," ACLU Immigrant Rights Project director Lucas Guttentag said in a Dec. 19 ACLU statement. According to the ACLU, most of those arrested "were simply waiting for approval of their green card applications or [have] minor visa problems caused by incompetence in the [INS] itself." The statement goes on to proclaim that the INS "is apparently using the program as a pretext for the mass detention of hundreds of Middle Eastern and Muslim men and boys."

Even aside from the program's troubling civil rights implications, critics say this is no way to go about finding any immigrants that might pose a potential threat to national security.

"The people who you're most interested in catching are the people who are least likely to show up to something like this," says John Pike, a national expert on issues of defense and intelligence and founder and director of GlobalSecurity.org. "This sort of bait-and-switch detention is the sort of thing that's going to make people leery of cooperating with the authorities."

Phase two of the special registration program is set to play out by Jan. 10, the date by which nationals from 13 other countries – Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen – must report to INS offices. Immigrants from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are required to register by Feb. 13. Given the experiences of the first group of registrants, "they're sure as heck not [likely] to show up," Pike says.

Heba Nimr, an immigration lawyer with La Raza Centro Legal, agrees. "It's a dragnet. It's not useful as a tool of law enforcement at all," she says. "Even if it was working efficiently, [by targeting people based on their nationality rather than on any particular activity] they're still going to be overloading themselves with information." What's more, the detentions cause more fear in the immigrant communities affected by the program. And that fear, she says, will likely result in driving more foreigners underground. On one hand, immigrants risk possible detention and even deportation proceedings if they report to the INS. On the other, "potentially, not complying could affect people's pending or future applications," she says. "Nobody should be going in to special register without talking to an attorney first."

Sharon Rummery, spokesperson for the INS's San Francisco district office, told us the INS won't release any statistics on how many immigrants have been detained so far through the special registration program, but lawyers estimate that number to range between 500 and 700 in California alone, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"Lots of people live in the U.S. because they left Iran due to the political situation," says Omid, who points out that none of the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon Sept. 11, 2001, were Iranian. "Being scrutinized and treated like this in a country that's supposed to be the land of opportunity ... It's a disgrace. I can't tell you how disappointed I am."