NAM Awards Winner: Silja Talvi

ColorsNW Magazine (Seattle), News Feature, Silja Talvi, Posted: Nov 14, 2006

Editor's Note: The writer has received a New America Media Ethnic Media Award for 2006 for her article, "The Real Enemy?", reprinted here, about the abuses of authority faced by the U.S. Muslim community since 9/11. NAM is recognizing outstanding ethnic media reporters this week in Washington, D.C. A complete list of all the winners is available here.

The Real Enemy?, by Silja Talvi, ColorsNW Magazine

Over the last several years, essential American freedoms and liberties have eroded before our eyes. The nation’s immigrant and Muslim populations have suffered the brunt of post-9/11 abuses of authority. A growing chorus of constitutional experts, legislators, and community organizers stress that we should consider their plight as inextricably tied with our own.

From the confines of the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Doreen Kopekope-Hershey tries her best to sound cheerful despite her circumstance and environment.

She does what she can to put on a “happy” face through Plexiglas windows for her husband and sister when they come for their visitations. It has been nearly a year since Kopekope-Hershey walked in to make a regularly scheduled immigration-related appointment, and was taken away in handcuffs without warning. It took nine months in custody for immigration custody officials to even review her case and detention status. The result of that process left her feeling even more hopeless. She was told that because she had appealed her deportation order, it could be another year or two before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has a chance to rule on her case. And she was told it would be highly unlikely for her to get out before then.

“There is nothing I can do but sit and wait,” Kopekope-Hershey says softly. “Every morning, I wake up and pray to God that I will be released.”

For 10 long months, the 35-year-old has not been able to hold her husband’s hand, cook her own food or feel fresh air on her face for more than an hour a day. Since being taken into detention June 1, Kopekope-Hershey has become physically ill and has been put on medications that, she says, make her hair fall out and her ears ring nonstop. When she was allowed to go to an appointment at an outside medical clinic, she was taken there in leg shackles. The humiliation of it, she says in hushed tones, left her feeling like she “wanted to die.”

“I’m not really OK, but I smile and say I’m fine,” Kopekope-Hershey says. “I can’t sleep at night ... but I try to stay strong.”

A Zambian-born immigrant and devout Christian who came to the United States in 1995 as a musical performer, Kopekope-Hershey is neither a terrorist nor a wanted criminal. What she is is an immigrant who overstayed her original visa. Both she and her husband, Curtis Hershey, say that they did everything they could to comply with all official requests for documents to prove that she had a legitimate reason for staying in the United States, not the least of which was their eight-year marriage.

She and her husband were willing to pay fines, and to send all the legal paperwork asked of them: tax records, marriage license, affidavits, proof of the fact that they had lived together the entire time of their marriage. They were willing to pay fines, to hire an immigration lawyer, and then, finally, for her to voluntarily subject to regular, in-person check-ins at an Immigration and Custody Enforcement (ICE) office in Tukwila. They maintain that they did everything that was asked of them.

“It doesn’t make sense,” says Hershey, a Euro-American born in the U.S. who works as a loan officer for a local mortgage company. “It’s not like she was a flight risk or missing her meetings when she was taken into custody ... and now, I can’t even touch her.”

Both Hershey and his wife say that the post-9/11 incarnation of ICE, formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), is to blame. The couple say the agency, which reports to the Department of Homeland Security, has lost paperwork and given a series of confusing and conflicting instructions to them over the past several years.

While they face their own, uniquely personal set of challenges in fighting what is now a standing deportation order, Kopekope-Hershey’s situation is unfortunately a common one: immigrants facing a system altogether unforgiving of even the most minor of (real or perceived) violations.

Criminalization of immigrants
Although this nation has always had a strange, uneasy relationship with various waves of immigrants to American shores — welcoming or shunning them depending on the political and economic climate — it can be fairly said that it has never criminalized them to current extent, both in terms of the conditions of their confinement and the indefinite nature of their detainment.

Two new federal bills threaten to further reclassify all “illegal aliens” as felons, and significantly increase penalties assessed against anyone who aids, hires, or “counsels” them. The proposal for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, sponsored in February by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has its match in the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437), backed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., which has passed in the House. If Congress can reconcile these bills, undocumented immigrants could face “indefinite conditional temporary status” and have no realistic path toward becoming citizens. Sensenbrenner’s bill also expands grounds for indefinite detention of immigrants, most of whom in recent years have been Arab and Muslim men.

Snagged in this web of detention are two local Muslim immigrants, Somalia-born Abu Abrahim Sheikh Mohammed and Saudi Arabia-born Majid al-Massari. Both have been locked away in solitary confinement for extended periods of time. Ostensibly, the confinement is justified because they are under suspicion of having something to do with “terrorism,” despite the fact that no criminal charges have been filed against them.

In July 2004, Majid al-Massari, now 35, disappeared from his job at the University of Washington School of Nursing after his secret arrest by a joint FBI/ICE team. The justification for the detention: alleged terrorist support activity. No one knew where al-Massari was for 11 days; since that time, he has languished in solitary confinement at the federal detention center in Sea-Tac for 18 months, is allowed no visits except from his attorneys and faces the possibility of deportation to Saudi Arabia.

In 1997, al-Massari applied to the United States for asylum because of his family’s persecution in Saudi Arabia. The case should have been processed within 180 days as required by law but he ended up waiting six and a half years. He then lost his asylum case because of the delays in processing. His lawyers are appealing. The likely result of al-Massari’s deportation would be his arrest and torture (as nearly every member of his dissident family has already been subjected to), or outright execution.

“On the thinnest of pretexts they have tried to implicate Majid as some sort of person who has given support and aid to an affiliate group associated with al-Qaeda,” says Damon Shadid, one of several attorneys working on his case. “The support that they say he gave was helping on a Web site for Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a human-rights organization in Saudi Arabia. But CDLR is not classified as a terrorist organization by this government.”
Shadid, who is affiliated with the Seattle-based Arab American Community Coalition, notes that when this fact was made clear to the immigration court, the court replied that they would “certainly find that (CDLR) is a terrorist organization.”

“This case is really about Saudi Arabia’s desire to get back at Majid’s father, Mohammed al-Massari,” says Shadid. The elder al-Massari is a Saudi dissident who started the group as a movement overthrow the Saudi monarchy, a staunch U.S. ally. “They were immediately imprisoned, tortured, the family and Majid’s brothers, aunts, anyone who was at all associated with CDLR,” Shadid says.

Since that time, the senior al-Massari fled from Saudi Arabia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom. Shadid says the Saudi Arabian government has already threatened harsh economic consequences in its economic trade relationship with England if it continues to refuse to extradite al-Massari.

Throughout this period, Majid al-Massari has been in the U.S., studying computer administration, which got him a job at the University of Washington. With the exception of one drug-related misdemeanor — a failed attempt to purchase cocaine several years ago — the self-described “computer geek” has been a normal Washington state resident, described by friends as well-liked, gregarious and kind, Shadid says. Al-Massari had a valid visa at the time of his arrest.

Deporting al-Massari would do nothing for the U.S. except to appease the Saudi Arabian government, as the Bush Administration has very close ties to that political regime, Shadid stresses.

Presumption of guilt
“There’s no question that Arab Americans and Muslims are targeted the most,” says Pramila Jayapal, executive director of the Seattle-based organization Hate Free Zone. “But these days, immigrants from anywhere can be treated as ‘suspected terrorists.’”

Writer Tram Nguyen explains that “there’s very little room left, within a national climate of fear and growing intolerance, for any infraction by someone without the legal status to be here” in the book, “We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11.”

“In a political imagination that has shifted so far to the right, people without status and with a certain profile must earn and deserve their place in society, must prove why they should not be suspected, jailed and shipped away,” Nguyen writes.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an estimated 1,200 Muslim, Arab American and South Asian men were detained. Many of these men were arrested in the early morning hours without being told why, and placed in jails and detention centers for long periods of time. In many cases, their families did not know where to find them for many days or weeks on end: names of the detainees were never released to the public. Many of these detainees (and deportees) have subsequently alleged serious emotional and physical abuse at the hands of federal agents and jail guards. None of these detainees were ever convicted on anything related to terrorist activity.

To date, the FBI has interviewed at least 11,000 individuals “under the guise of seeking terrorism related information. These men have also been primarily Muslim, Arab American and South Asian men, according to Tram Nguyen in her book, “We Are All Suspects Now.”

In addition, the Justice Department required a process of “special registration” for noncitizen men 16 years and older, from 25 Muslim and African countries. As the men voluntarily showed up for registration, nearly 14,000 were processed into deportation hearings, and 2,870 were detained. Again, the process yielded no terrorism-related convictions.

Many Americans may have originally felt that the post-9/11 measures were a common-sense reaction to the horror of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Perhaps, as the justifications were spun, any possible overreaction would surely be corrected over the course of a few years. Many citizens seemed to respond to rapid and far-reaching legislative changes – as well as the large-scale government agency reorganization — with the sense that these steps were acceptable because they were intended to capture, incarcerate and/or deport those who truly posed a threat to the safety of the nation.

But as public opinion polls show, the federal government’s expansion of its own powers hasn’t been seen as positive for the American people — or for the very notion (and reputation) of our constitutional democracy.

“Fighting the war on terror should not mean that we give up our First Amendment rights,” says Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. “The strength of this country is that we stand up for each other, and for the differences of other people. (We) should encourage, respect and protect that.”

McDermott has been joined by a growing bipartisan chorus of legislators who have called for a close re-examination of how U.S. civil liberties have been sidestepped or trampled altogether in the name of the “war on terror.”

Recent revelations of domestic surveillance of individuals and activist groups by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have heightened such concerns. To many, such revelations have also supported what organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) were warning Americans about all along: after 9/11, the federal government embarked down a dangerous slope of incursions into people’s fundamental, constitutionally protected rights, including the freedom to speech, association, assembly and due process.

In 2001, under heavy pressure from the Bush Administration — including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft — the Patriot Act was easily passed by both the U.S. Senate and the House, with only 66 dissenters on record. This move took place just six short weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

The USA Patriot Act, an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, enabled a stunning expansion of law-enforcement powers.

Under the guise of combating terrorism, the bill broadened permissions for the purposes of domestic surveillance, information collection, and search-and-seizure powers — even on the thinnest of suspicions.

More specifically, the Patriot Act allows for law-enforcement agencies to conduct secret “sneak and peek” searches of individual homes and businesses, in addition to large-scale fishing expeditions of the identities, affiliations and records of immigrants and citizens alike.

The indefinite detention of non-deportable immigrants on even the smallest of violations – even if those violations have nothing to do with terrorist activity — constituted one of the most immediately visible effects of the Patriot Act.

When the bipartisan 9/11 Commission released its own exhaustive findings, it concluded that the terrorist attacks would have not been prevented by a curtailing of civil liberties. Nor, as the commissioners emphasized, would such attacks be prevented in the future by more of the same. “The choice between security and liberty is a false choice,” they said.

But according to ICE, their efforts have a deterrant effect. They say, “To put it simply, it’s often difficult to prosecute terrorism cases in the absence of an overt act of terrorism. But waiting for terrorists to act could cost lives. That’s why ICE uses every legal tool at our disposal to arrest terrorist suspects on related criminal charges. By drawing on our investigative expertise and law enforcement authorities as counter-terrorism tools, ICE seeks to strike the terrorists before they can strike at the United States.”

Domestic spying unpopular
In February, a poll commissioned by the American Bar Association revealed that 52 percent of respondents did not believe the president of the United States had the right to suspend constitutional freedoms. Another 25 percent said such suspensions were only acceptable if authorized by Congress or a court of law. Only 18 percent of those polled believed that the president had the right to suspend constitutional rights anytime he felt it “necessary to protect the country.”

These findings and expressions of public opinion have been thoroughly dismissed by the White House, particularly when the Bush administration sought to ensure that Congress renewed the “sunset” provisions of the Patriot Act, as it did earlier this year.

President Bush and top-ranking federal officials have repeatedly insisted that the Patriot Act would not —and has not – impacted the lives of innocent American citizens or their constitutional rights.

Such protestations, however, are seen by many critics as lacking in substance, particularly in the face of recent revelations that the FBI has been using “counterterrorism” resources to monitor and infiltrate a wide range of domestic, peaceful organizations ranging from animal-rights to anti-war groups. (Locally, these groups have included the musical satire group, the Raging Grannies, and the Snohomish County Peace Action of Edmonds.) And a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general last month found that the FBI violated its own intelligence-gathering protocols more than 100 times in the past two years, utilizing the complete contents of 181 telephone calls (rather than just the billing and toll records of certain, targeted phone numbers), as well as unauthorized searches of personal property.

In December, The New York Times first revealed that Bush signed a secret order in 2002 expanding the NSA’s power to spy on Americans. According to news reports later confirmed by the federal government, Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to monitor telephone and e-mail communications of those American citizens and immigrants who were communicating with people abroad, without a court order as had previously been required by law.

Such authorization “reflects the president’s willingness to do what he wants, and to do it with impunity,” McDermott says.

A Washington Post investigation in February revealed that of the estimated 5,000 overseas calls monitored by the NSA since 2002, fewer than 10 per year had actually “aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well.”

In January, the ACLU sued the NSA to try to stop the agency from continuing to spy on Americans without federal court permission. In a news release announcing the lawsuit, the ACLU noted that the program also allows for wholesale data mining by “sifting through millions of calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans.” And in March, the Center for Constitutional Rights requested a court order prohibiting the government from “continuing its illegal spying on Americans and to disclose whether the government eavesdropped on confidential attorney-client communications.”

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) – created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency – maintains a central repository of at least 325,000 names of domestic and international terrorism suspects, as well as of those suspected of aiding the suspects. For this database, suspicion cast atop suspicion is enough to warrant at least some level of surveillance and/or data gathering on individuals residing in or outside of the United States.

There’s no question that far too large a net has been cast in the name of counterterrorism, says Doug Honig, communications director for the ACLU of Washington. “There are no adequate checks and balances to prevent innocent people from getting targeted. If you look at the evidence so far, most of the people who have been targeted (for interrogation and detention) have, in fact, been innocent.”

One case in point is that of Abdulameer Yousef Habeeb, who received political refugee status in the U.S. in 2002, after providing evidence that his brother and father were killed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s government. Habeeb himself had been imprisoned and tortured twice, and his body still bears the scars of the brutality.

Habeeb, who moved to Kent, committed no crimes and was not on any government “watch list” of any kind. But when he took a train through Havre, Mont., in April 2003 on his way to Washington, D.C., for a job interview with an Arabic-language newspaper, he was singled out by two federal agents.

Asked repeatedly if he had complied with the “special registration” process demanded of immigrant men from predominantly Muslim countries after 9/11, Habeeb explained that his political refugee status did not require such registration. Habeeb was correct, but he still was arrested on the spot.

Questioned at length by both FBI and ICE agents, Habeeb was detained for three days in a Montana jail where he was forced to strip in front of a government agent, and endure taunts of “Saddam” by other inmates. When he was finally transported back to Seattle, he spent four more nights in a detention facility, facing deportation to Iraq. Even though there were no grounds for any of this — for the arrest, the detention, or the deportation order – Habeeb was made to feel as though he had, indeed, committed a serious crime.

“They made me believe that I did something wrong even though I had done nothing wrong,” Habeeb said in a written statement.

The deportation proceedings were finally terminated and Habeed was freed eight days later. Habeeb lost his job offer in the process. Last month, the ACLU of Washington sued the two federal agents who initially arrested him.

“All that Habeeb did was to get off a train to stretch his legs; this is a classic example of racial/ethnic profiling,” Honig says.

Somali community targeted
In Seattle, the Somali community has paid a particularly heavy price in the form of interrogation, arrest and the search and seizure of homes and businesses. When local imam (pastor) Abu Abrahim Sheikh Mohamed, 39, was arrested last November by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Somali community experienced another familiar rush of panic.

But this time, their reaction was different in one key way.

They didn’t stay behind locked doors, worrying about the terrifying visits from FBI agents, which have become commonplace in their community.

Instead, in late January, Somali Muslim women and men alike gathered around the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where Mohamed is being held, and protested, in silence. They brought traditional food and tea, and comforted each other, praying for a positive outcome in Mohamed’s case.

Inside, Mohamed was waiting to hear if he would be released on bail, particularly as the government had not even charged him with any crime of terrorism. The only claim that is being used to keep Mohamed behind bars is that he used falsified information to obtain his asylum status in the United States. Mohamed came to the U.S. in 2000, successfully sought asylum in Seattle the following year, and was hired in 2003 as the imam of a small mosque, Abu Bakr, in Rainier Valley.

To try to make some kind of terrorism charge stick, ICE attorneys have honed in on the fact that Mohamed is fuzzy on the details of the places he’s lived and the dates of certain events in his life. A convicted felon in a federal witness-protection program was allowed to testify, by phone, at Mohamed’s bail hearing. That man, Peter Coleman, said he knew that Mohamed was recruiting young boys for terrorist activities. No evidence, however, has been produced to back up this claim.

Many local officials, including Seattle City Councilman David Della, have questioned the grounds for Mohamed’s arrest and consequent solitary detention.

Abdullahi Jama, a senior organizer at Hate Free Zone, says many Somalis who attended the silent protest outside of the detention facility subsequently received letters or visits from the FBI. “They are very afraid,” Jama says. “This community comes from a war-torn country, and they have experience with dictatorship, with national security services who come to the house in the middle of the night and arrest people who never come back.”

The problem with the approach taken toward this community, adds Jama, is that it is proving to be counterproductive. People are so intimidated and frightened by government officials that they are frightened to say or do anything — much less report any hypothetical suspicious activity — out of the fear that they, too, might be charged with aiding a terrorist and then deported to Somalia.

“The Somalis who fled their country and came here feel very lucky to be here. They give thanks to the U.S. government and to the American people for giving them an opportunity to go to school, to work, to pay taxes,” Jama adds. “But now, people are really scared, and it’s a terrible thing to see.”

Most detainees invisible
Even higher-profile cases like Mohamed’s haven’t gotten as much media or community attention as would in case the detainees were non-immigrants. But they have attracted some concern within their respective religious/ethnic communities, as well as on the part of local civil-rights organizations and human-rights groups.

Still, even Kopekope-Hershey’s case hasn’t made the papers, and it isn’t likely to.

In a sense, her situation is more broadly reflective of the place that many immigrants find themselves in today: unseen, unheard and facing the unforgiving hammer of an unwieldy, disorganized government agency. Whether Kopekope-Hershey and her husband will ever be reunited remains to be seen; as it stands, she faces the very real possibility of deportation to Zambia from Seattle, the city that she has called home for 11 years.

“Do they have to punish me like this?” asks Kopekope-Hershey. “The (immigration officials) made so many mistakes, and (yet) I am feeling all of their punishment.”


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