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> Forty Indians held in US raid
> San Francisco: Forty Indian nationals working as contract computer
> programmers for the US Air Force were arrested at the Randolph Air Force
> Base in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday morning during a raid by
> immigration agents.
> The crackdown was the culmination of a six-month Immigration and
> Naturalisation Service probe into an alleged visa scam at the Alamo City
> defence installation. While some of the engineers were let off on
> Thursday, 27 of their colleagues remained in detention on Friday
> afternoon. They were released later in the evening.
>
> INS officials in San Antonio said all the Indian engineers were on a H1B
> work visa. Their companies had applied for H1B visas from Houston. They
> were working in San Antonio. They were basically not working where they
> were supposed to, an INS official said, preferring not to be named.
>
> Two firms sub-contracting for ACS Government Solutions Group Inc., the Air
> Force Personnel Centres prime contractor for developing computer
> programmes at the centre, are suspected of telling federal authorities the
> workers would be placed in Houston, then later shifting them to San
> Antonio.
>
> Manohar Reddy, president of Houston-based Frontier Consulting Inc., one of
> the two companies placed under suspicion, said he had done nothing wrong.
> All the engineers are on valid visas. All our paperwork is in place.
>
> We have our attorneys working on the case, Reddy said, declining to
> comment any further. While Rana Pratap, head of the other company, Softech
> Consulting Inc., was unavailable for comment, his attorney Rahul Reddy
> felt the INS raid was aimed at his client because he was Indian. It was a
> region specific raid targeting Indian companies.
>
> All the engineers are within their legal status. And if something was
> amiss, the INS should have contacted the company and not harassed these
> people, Reddy said. Chandrashekhar Reddy Soma, a software programmer with
> the Rockville, Maryland-based ACS Government Solutions Group Inc., was one
> of the 40 Indians to be picked up, handcuffed and humiliated by the INS
> agents.
>
> We were doing our work when all of a sudden there was an announcement that
> all non-immigrant Indians must report for checking, Soma told this
> correspondent, adding that he had suspected nothing amiss as the Air Force
> regularly conducted such checks.
>
> The unsuspecting engineers were in for a rude shock when they were
> confronted by gun-totting INS agents who allegedly manhandled them and
> informed them that they were all under investigation for illegal
> operations.
>
> Soma recalled how he and other engineers were handcuffed and bundled into
> waiting vans. Pregnant women were also not spared a similar treatment, he
> said. The handcuffed engineers were forced to undergo a humiliating march
> through their office building before being driven to prison.
>
> Rahul Reddy admitted it was not normal procedure for INS agents to enter
> into a workplace, arrest and handcuff employees. The programmers, who have
> been working at the Air Force installation for the past three years, are
> developing an Oracle human resources project. The next-generation
> personnel management system will serve active-duty airmen, reservists, the
> National Guard and retirees.
>
> Three hundred and twenty contractors and Air Force personnel are employed
> at the site. Of these 80 are Indian computer engineers. We were forced to
> walk handcuffed into our apartments, said Kishore Bollu, another software
> programmer with ACS Government Solutions Group Inc., recounting the
> humiliation he and other Indians were put through.
>
> They wanted me to produce my papers while I was still handcuffed. They
> even tried to take us into our banks with our handcuffs on so that we
> could retrieve our documents. It was only after we pleaded with them did
> they remove the shackles, but still three INS men marched each of us into
> the bank, he said.
>
> Bollu, who has done his masters in computer science from the US, said he
> and other Indian engineers were later taken to jail where they were forced
> to share a filthy cell with a group of Mexicans arrested on charges of
> border crossing.
>
> It was a very humiliating and embarrassing experience. We had never
> expected this kind of treatment, Bollu said, adding: Until now we never
> thought being an Indian was something to be ashamed of.
>
> We are all engineers and some of us hold masters degrees. We can never
> forgive the INS for the kind of treatment that was meted out to us, he
> said, summing up the mood of Indians in San Antonio.
>
> A source said the three-year-old multi-million dollar Air Force project
> was recently put on line. Hinting at the suspicious timing of the raid,
> the source said: All these Indian engineers will be out of their jobs in
> March. Why wasnt the raid conducted six months ago? The INS had the same
> information it had now.
>
> But, had the raid taken place then the Air Force project would have been
> in jeopardy. A statement from the Air Force said the Indian engineers had
> no access to classified data and were not believed to have breached
> security at the base, one of four Air Force installations in San Antonio.
>
> The Indians had zero access to classified material and had minimal access
> to military and civilian personnel records, the statement said. Meanwhile,
> US energy secretary Bill Richardson said in Washington on Friday that
> Asian-American scientists in the US energy department nuclear laboratories
> had been adversely affected by suspicion following the arrest of a
> Taiwanese-born scientist on charges of breaching security.
>
> Richardson said steps to rectify this have been introduced, including a
> stand down so that the departments employees can devote a day to consider
> steps to stop racial profiling.
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> End of Special Bulletin
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