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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (156751)	12/25/2002 10:45:14 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580641

Civil Liberties Groups Sue Over Calif. Arrests Tue Dec 24, 3:41 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo! By Jill Serjeant LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The U.S. Attorney General and the nation's immigration service were hit by a class action civil liberties lawsuit on Tuesday over the mass detentions of immigrants from Muslim countries who came forward to register under new anti-terrorism rules. A coalition of Arab and Muslim groups sought an immediate injunction against further arrests and alleged that large numbers of men who came forward to register in southern California last week had been unlawfully detained. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, followed outrage over the detentions of hundreds of immigrants -- most of them Iranians -- who presented themselves at immigration offices under the anti-terrorism program and who were taken away in handcuffs and locked up, sometimes for days, for overstaying their visas. The Department of Justice (news - web sites) did not return calls seeking comment on the lawsuit which named Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service as defendants. Local immigration lawyers estimated last week that about 1,000 men and boys were detained in standing room only centers, and forced to sleep on concrete floors, under a system designed to track potential "terrorists" but which instead locked up many caught in the lengthy process for obtaining permanent residence. Official figures from the Department of Justice and the INS put the number of detentions in California at less than 250. By Tuesday, officials said that about 20 were still detained in the Los Angeles area, five in San Diego and a handful in San Francisco. PROGRAM CALLED 'IRRATIONAL' The men were detained under a post-Sept. 11 program which requires males over 16, without permanent residence, from 20 Arab or Muslim countries to register with authorities. Peter Schey, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and the lead attorney for the six, unnamed plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said mass registration was irrational because "no undocumented terrorist will come forward." Schey said the lawsuit was not about resisting registration but about the way it was being implemented. "The program is being used as a scam to lure people into INS offices supposedly to register, when what they really face is arrest, detention and even deportation despite their pending petitions to legalize their status which the INS refuses to process," he said. The registration deadline for the first group, which included Iranians from the 600,000-strong Iranian exile community in the Los Angeles area, fell on Dec. 16. Deadlines are approaching in January and February for citizens of Afghanistan (news - web sites), Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The lawsuit asked for an injunction ordering the government not to arrest any other people without a warrant and to prevent the deportation or holding without bail of detainees with avenues available to legalize their status. It said the detentions of otherwise law-abiding immigrants "seriously undermines prospects for future compliance and constitutes an absurd waste of resources." CONFIDENCE IN INS ERODED "The mass arrests have further eroded confidence in the fairness of the INS and the immigration system among Arab and Muslim communities," said the lawsuit. It was filed by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Alliance of Iranian Americans, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the National Council of Pakistani Americans. Local media have highlighted cases of professionals, like San Francisco-area engineer Ramsin Ziazadeh, who works at National Semiconductor and Faramarz Farahani, a database manager at a Silicon Valley company. Both men were born in Iran and were detained for failing to report to the INS on time. "We got word he might be released soon, but I can't believe he went through this incredible four-day ordeal," Farahani's wife Judy Shum told the San Francisco Chronicle. "One day he's an (information technology) professional with a briefcase, the next he's in shackles at the INS office." Khurrum Wahid of the Council on American Islamic Relations said the groups bringing the lawsuit wanted to prevent such situations happening again. "We feel the INS really didn't take into account the situation of the people they were detaining and the disruption to their lives, and they were not prepared to execute the procedure that they themselves had set up," Wahid told Reuters.