On the last Friday evening in January, two weeks after the overseas detention of local community leader Sabri Samirah, nearly 100 Muslims gathered in the basement of the Mosque Foundation, a house of worship in south-suburban Bridgeview. They were there for a workshop on how to deal with “Special Registration,” part of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the Justice Department’s new program to document the whereabouts of foreign visitors ages 16 to 45 from predominantly Muslim countries.
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Special Registration is being handled on a country-by-country basis, starting with Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria, whose nationals were initially supposed to register by December 16. Confusion has already caused the deadline to be pushed back in several cases; Saudis and Pakistanis, who were due to have complied by this Friday, February 21, now have four extra weeks to do so. In addition, the policy doesn’t specify any requirements for Palestinians. In Bridgeview, which has one of the largest Palestinian populations outside of the West Bank, this gap has caused a great deal of concern.
Some observers have characterized Special Registration as damage control on the part of an agency embarrassed at having issued new visas to dead hijackers Marwan al Shehhi and Mohamed Atta six months after September 11. But the process of writing new laws to combat terrorism actually started just after the attacks, with the PATRIOT Act, which gave Attorney General John Ashcroft and other lawmakers wide leeway to bypass the legal checks and balances that usually protect civil liberties.
Then came a 20-minute break for prayer. The men filed upstairs, the women knelt downstairs, and two girls who looked to be about ten years old forgot about the cups of coffee they’d loaded with creamer and left on a table in the corner. As people filed back to their seats, someone jostled the table, spilling the coffee all over flyers from the Arab American Action Network and other agencies listing registration tips.
A man from the West Bank with a Jordanian passport raised his hand to ask what he should be doing. The basement suddenly grew noisy with queries from others in the same situation. National advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee concur that it’s difficult to figure out how Special Registration applies to Palestinians. The latter group sent a letter to the Justice Department asking for clarification, but Nabil Mohamad, who works in the Washington office, said this week that what they got back doesn’t do much to clear things up. Khurrum Wahid, who handles legal issues for CAIR, says, “The INS doesn’t even know as to what category these people fall into.”
