The order, issued last November by Attorney General John Ashcroft, targets men and teenagers over the age of 16 holding temporary U.S. residency from a list of 25 countries in the Middle East and Asia, most of them with large Muslim populations. Those falling under this category were required to register—that is, to be interrogated, photographed, and fingerprinted by the immigration cops—by deadlines set between December 2002 and April of this year.

The “special registration” requirement sparked protests in Los Angeles, New York, and other cities. On December 18 thousands of people rallied in Los Angeles—some of them holding signs that read, “What’s next? Concentration camps?”—to protest the arrest of some 500 Iranian-Americans after they had registered with the immigration cops.

Some of those facing deportation today have been waiting for months or even years for officials to process their applications for residency status. In a catch-22, the immigration police declared they are “illegal immigrants” even though they had green card applications pending.

In the last two years the number of expulsions of Pakistanis, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Moroccans has doubled, and the number of Egyptians deported has tripled.

Washington deported more than 600 Arabs and Muslims in the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, but the Justice Department stopped giving information on these actions after the number of arrested immigrants reached 1,200. It still refuses to provide complete statistics for that period.

On June 2, the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report criticizing the federal government’s treatment of immigrants jailed as part of the “antiterrorism” raids. Focusing on the detention of 762 immigrants held after September 11, the report said those arrested in New York City, many of them born in Pakistan, were subjected to “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse” from guards. More than 80 held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn were placed in 23-hour per day “lockdown” in their cells, with their families often told they were not being held in that facility. The cops refused to notify some of the prisoners for more than a month of the charges under which they were being held.

None of the 762 detainees reviewed in the report were charged with “terrorist” offenses; one man was arrested on the basis of a complaint to the police that he had made “anti-American” statements. Most of those arrested were charged, after their arrests, with minor immigration infractions such as an expired visa.

Justice Department spokesperson Barbara Comstock said, “we make no apologies” for the government’s detentions and deportations.

The internal report, issued by an internal Justice Department “watchdog,” offers only a glimpse of the brutality meted out to immigrants caught up in the dragnet. The report’s conclusion is that the raids were “abuses” or “errors” that, by “casting the net too wide,” detracted from a supposedly legitimate campaign against “terrorism.” While the examples cited in the report are described in the past tense, they fail to mention ongoing injustices such as the indefinite detention without charges of Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti, who continues to be held in solitary confinement.  
 
 
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