IMMIGRANT PROFILING

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, May/Jun 2004 by Bebow, John

Arabs face scrutiny in Detroit area in two years following 9/11 terrorist attacks

How are local Arab-Americans faring in the domestic front of the war on terror?

Reporters in communities with significant numbers of Arab immigrants can get at that complicated question through government databases and local court records.

Metro Detroit is home to one of the nation's largest concentrations of Arabs - and a squad of federal terror investigators numbering in the dozens. The Detroit News launched a four-month investigation into the local war on terror last summer. The aim was to get beyond a handful of high-profile cases and press conference pronouncements from both prosecutors and community groups. We wanted to chart the wider impacts of the most intense scrutiny of an immigrant group since Japanese internment during World War II.

Our series, called "Always Suspect," appeared in November. Among the conclusions:

* Federal prosecutors in Detroit have tripled the number of criminal cases brought against Arabs and Muslims in the past two years while dozens of people have been labeled as terror suspects. But the government has so far proven terror connections against only one out of every 50 terror suspects considered for prosecution.

* Federal prosecutors in Detroit filed criminal complaints or indictments against at least 132 people of Arab or Muslim descent in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The News could find 42 such cases in the two years before the attacks. The most common charges are various frauds, drug-related crimes and immigration violations - not teiTorism.

* Three terror-related convictions won by federal prosecutors in Detroit represent only a glimpse into a much wider local terror war. Federal agents in Metro Detroit have sought criminal charges against at least 155 terror suspects since 9/11.

* The News positively identified 34 people of Arab or Muslim descent in Metro Detroit who were officially under investigation for terrorism-related activities but charged with lesser crimes. With little explanation, investigators gave these 34 cases labels such as "terrorism-international," "terrorism-domestic" and "terrorism-related financing." Federal prosecutors have so far obtained convictions of some sort against half of those people. Those convictions were mainly for frauds, immigration problems and drug offenses - not terrorism.

* Deportation orders against people from 24 Arab and Muslim nations increased 20 percent in Michigan in the two years since the terrorist attacks, compared to the previous two years. Total deportation orders against all illegal immigrants, however, have remained flat in Michigan since 9/11. And enforcement against Mexicans - who are ordered deported more often than any other immigrant group - dropped by 20 percent.

'Stop pretending'

While federal prosecutors insisted the increased scrutiny is justified in the war on terror, Arab-American leaders said the News ' findings documented what had been clear on the streets of Arab America for two years.

"They are feeding the frenzy we live in. The worst thing you can do in this country right now is label people as terrorists," said Mohammed Abdrabboh, the only Arab member of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. he said the News' findings were clear evidence of racial profiling. "We know what they're doing, they know what they're doing, so let's all just stop pretending."

With the assistance of fellow News reporter Gregg Krupa, I went down several document trails to gauge the local war on terror. These steps could be replicated in many local markets:

1 ) We gathered community input first. We held a meeting for more than a dozen Arab leaders to explain community perceptions before we started digging. Universally, representatives of the legal, business, and social service sectors claimed the local Arab community was under constant investigation by government investigators.

2. To measure whether Arab cases had increased in federal court, we reviewed the dockets of more than 90 assistant U.S. attorneys going back four years. The first hurdle came in getting a list of prosecutors. The U.S. Attorney's office refused to provide it. Rather than engage in a lengthy FOIA battle, we obtained the list of prosecutors from a friendly federal judge. We then used a simple Excel spreadsheet to log case details of all defendants with Arabic or Muslim surnames. We vetted those surnames through the Arab-American Institute and local Arab-American groups. (Tip: Pollster John Zogby, of Zogby International, maintains a database of Arabic surnames that can be helpful.) Finally, wherever possible we reviewed pre-trial summary reports in case files. Those reports and other case details often identified defendants' nationalities.

3. To track local terror suspects, we subscribed to TRACFed (http://tracfed.syr.edu/), an invaluable depository of government databases maintained by a nonprofit group affiliated with Syracuse University. Through TRACFed, we accessed the case management system maintained by the Executive Office for United States Attorneys of the U.S. justice Department. This federal database allowed us to determine that federal agents had recommended prosecution against 155 local terror suspects since 9/11.