U.S. might deport 13,000 immigrants..living in this country illegally

[MORTARDUDE]

U.S. might deport 13,000 immigrants
Action stems from voluntary registration program; few are linked to terrorism
By Rachel L. Swarns

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Saturday, June 7, 2003

WASHINGTON -- More than 13,000 of the Arab and Muslim men who came forward earlier this year to register with immigration authorities -- roughly 16 percent of the total -- face deportation, government officials said.

Only a handful of the men have been linked to terrorism. But of the 82,000 who registered, more than 13,000 have been found to be living in this country illegally, officials said.

Many had hoped to win leniency by registering and demonstrating their willingness to cooperate with the government's campaign against terrorism. The men were not promised special treatment, however, and officials think most of them will be expelled in what is likely to be the largest wave of deportations in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The government has initiated deportation proceedings, and in immigrant communities across the country, an exodus has already begun. Still, the impact of the registrations is being felt more broadly, and with far more nuance, than that stark statistic -- 13,000 men older than 16 -- can express.

Quietly, the fabric of their neighborhoods is thinning. Families are packing up, and some are splitting up. Rather than come forward and risk deportation, an unknowable number of immigrants have burrowed deeper underground. Others have simply left -- for Canada or for home.

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration is increasingly using the nation's immigration system as a weapon in the battle against terrorism.

For decades, illegal immigrants often have flourished in plain view because officials lacked the staff, resources and political will to deport them. But since the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and the Washington area, the government has been aggressively detaining and deporting illegal immigrants from countries considered breeding grounds for terrorism.

"There's been a major shift in our priorities," said Jim Chaparro, acting director for interior enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security, the new agency that has subsumed the old immigration service.

"We need to focus our enforcement efforts on the biggest threats," he added. "People may not like that strategy, but that is what we need to do. If a loophole can be exploited by an immigrant, it can also be exploited by a terrorist."

Advocates for immigrants warn that that strategy -- indeed the administration's sweeping reorientation of law enforcement toward terrorism prevention -- can be abused by overzealous government officials.

Although it did not deal directly with the registration program, they point to an internal Justice Department report, released this week, that was deeply critical of the government's roundup of illegal immigrants after Sept. 11. Senior officials repeatedly ignored calls from immigration officials to quickly distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. As a result, many people who had no ties to terrorism languished in jail unnecessarily, the report said.

Advocates for immigrants also have accused officials of practicing selective enforcement by targeting illegal immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries. Rather than disrupting communities, they said, the government should focus its efforts on improving its intelligence and prosecution of terrorists.

"I think what the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the immigrants' rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way."

Some of the men facing deportation have been waiting months and years for overburdened officials to process applications to legalize their status. Immigration lawyers said they think a substantial number of these men might successfully challenge the government in the nation's immigration courts and avoid deportation. Their clients are illegal, the lawyers said, only because of the government's inefficiencies.

Even before the registration program began, the government had deported hundreds of illegal immigrants to prevent, and not simply respond to, terrorist attacks. But the scope of those deportations remains unclear.

Officials said more than 600 Arab and Muslim illegal immigrants were deported during the first wave of expulsions after Sept. 11. But the Justice Department stopped releasing figures after the number of arrested immigrants surged to 1,200, and officials have repeatedly declined to give complete statistics for that period.

Another wave of deportations began last year after officials announced that they planned to find and arrest illegal immigrants who pose security threats and already have deportation orders. Of that group, more than 3,000 people have been arrested. Officials said they cannot know how many of those Arab and Muslim men have been deported.

But it is the special registration program, which required noncitizens from 25 Arab and Muslim countries to register with the government from December through April, that seems likely to produce the largest number of expulsions.

Over the past two months, government officials have released a succession of tallies of immigrants facing deportation; the 13,000 figure represents the most up-to-date estimate, officials said.

Officials acknowledge that most of the Arab and Muslim immigrants swept up in counterterrorism sweeps have no ties to terrorist groups. Of the 82,000 men who showed up at immigration offices, and tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings over the past six months, 11 have had links to terrorism, officials said.

But officials said they can no longer afford to ignore illegal immigrants from countries that pose a security risk. They note that several of the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country illegally at the time of the attacks.

"You have to look at not just the terrorists themselves but on the mechanisms that they exploit," Chaparro said. "This government has come to realize that immigration enforcement is a very effective tool in the war on anti-terrorism."

In all, deportations of illegal immigrants from Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries have surged by nearly 27 percent in the past two years. The number of Egyptians expelled has nearly tripled. In the immigrant communities, the impact multiplies.

The Pakistani Embassy in Washington, for example, said that in the uneasy climate since Sept. 11, more than 15,000 of its citizens in the United States illegally are believed to have packed their bags and left for Canada, Europe and Pakistan.