Ashcroft's roundup - John Ashcroft's Special Registration

Progressive, The, March, 2003 by Mark Engler, Saurav Sarkar

The INS admitted on January 16 to detaining 1,169 people under Special Registration, and to issuing "orders to appear" for deportation proceedings to twice that many--approximately 10 percent of the 24,000 people who came to register by mid-January. Lawsuits and public outrage have prompted the INS to say it will lighten the heavy-handed response of its first round of registration. "It does appear the process was not as smooth as we would have liked it to have been," INS spokesperson Francisco Arcuate told reporters. "If all is in order, they are allowed to go on their merry way."

But despite such assurances, immigrants continue to be harassed and detained for minor visa violations. In January, the INS detained Khurram Ali, twenty-two, an engineering student at Hunter College in New York, for not paying his college fees, according to wire service reports. Another student in Colorado was jailed in late December for being one credit hour short of his visa requirement, having dropped a course earlier in the semester with the college's permission. On January 28, Ejaz Haider, an editor at one of Pakistan's most prominent newspapers and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, was pulled off a D.C. street by two INS agents and temporarily held at the INS detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, for allegedly missing a deadline to report to the agency.

Such stories have sparked widespread consternation and fear in affected communities. "In Little Pakistan, on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, the grocery stores, money changers, restaurants, insurance offices, clothing and jewelry stores look deserted," writes the Pakistan Post. "It's not just a lack of customers; many of the shop owners themselves have fled to Canada." Says one family head interviewed by the paper, "We never thought we would flee America."

During a recent visit to the neighborhood, we interviewed a man holding a green card. He said he had previously saved $100,000 to put down on a new home in the area. Now, he said, "I am saving it for when I get detained." He added that he and others were worried that after the current targets, the Bush Administration "would come after green-card holders and then citizens." Another woman, a store owner in the neighborhood, argued: "We should register so they can lock us up?"

Given that the INS's increasingly backlogged caseloads already contain detailed information on most people subject to Registration, the value of the data it has brought in appears minimal compared with the program's chilling effect.

"In real honest-to-God police work, where you want to catch bad guys, you better have intelligence coming from the streets--people informing you about what's going on," says law professor David Harris, author of Profiles in Injustice. "Like other forms of racial profiling, the Registration program is creating the type of distrust that stops people from coming forward to the police with information."

"The government really hurt its relationship with the American Muslim community," says CAIR's Khan. "We're telling the world that we're friendly with Muslims and we want to work with Muslim countries to fight terrorism. But when people are jailed, that sends a much louder message."