Ashcroft's roundup - John Ashcroft's Special Registration

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

For Muslim immigrants, Special Registration is a kind of Catch-22: They risk possible detention and deportation if they come forward. And they face criminal penalties if they don't.

"If your goal is to make tens of thousands of Muslim males easily deportable, then you may be accomplishing that," says Butterfield. "You don't have to round everyone up and put them in internment camps if you can deport them all or if you can set up policies so onerous that people vote with their feet and stay away."

Mark Engler is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He can be reached at engler@eudoramail.com. Saurav Sarkar is an organizer on 9/11 detention issues for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City.