Arab-american association condemns US plan to focus attention on Arab men for deportation
Regional-USA, Local, 1/9/2002

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) condemned on Tuesday a new U.S. Justice Department policy that will focus on 6,000 Arab men out of the 300,000 persons ordered deported but remained in the United States because they are young men from the Middle East.

The ADC says in a release quoting Immigration and Naturalisation Service Commissioner James W. Ziglar that the Justice Department intends to enter the names of "absconders" into a national FBI crime database over the next year in order to find and deport them, and that it will enter the names of men of Middle Eastern origin first, focusing attention on this relatively small group.

ADC expresses opposition to all measures that codify racial, ethnic or religious discrimination in government policy, including immigration policy. It also considers this "a bias already expressed in a number of other policies developed since the Sept. 11 attacks." ADC says "one clear example is the ongoing Justice Department plan to investigate some 5,000 young Arab men who entered the United States since Jan. 1, 2000. Young men from Arab and Muslim states who apply for visas to visit the United States also now have to wait an additional 20 days and answer a special questionnaire not required of any other persons.

Hundreds of Arab men arrested since Sept. 11 remain in jail for minor visa violations which would not normally lead to incarceration, ADC further deplores commenting that these elements combine to create the impression that the government feels that young Arab men are, by definition, suspicious, potentially dangerous and are of interest to the authorities.

ADC President Ziad Asali, recognizing that the administration has every right to try to deport persons who should not be in this country, says that "by creating policies that discriminate in this manner, the government is inadvertently fostering fear and suspicion of Arabs and Arab-Americans, and undermining its own calls on Americans not to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion. There is no basis to believe that these discriminatory policies will enhance the security of the American people, but they certainly do diminish our society's values and our commitment to fairness and equality," he concludes

Hundreds of people, mostly of Middle Eastern origin, have been detained by US authorities since last September's attacks. The Justice Department last year began interviewing more than 5,000 men of Middle Eastern background, who entered the United States on non-immigrant visas in 2000.

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  FBI arrests two Jews suspected of terrorism   (12/13/2001)

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