Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2005 Student Work

Oladukon’s Plight: A Word in Anger Ends in Exile from America

By Ivan Karakashian

With less than two months before graduating, Sulaiman Oladukon, a 29-year-old Nigerian Muslim student at State University of New York Maritime College, was busily studying for his mid-term exams. On March 6, 2003, Oladukon, along with his classmates, joined the “Order of the Engineer” in an induction ceremony and was about to receive his Bachelor of Arts in engineering. But the very next day, before the crowded College library, two agents of the Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Oladukon with no warrant or explanation. They refused to allow Oladukon to take his handbag or books. They simply handcuffed him and led him to their jeep and his ordeal began.

Confused and terrified, Oladukon tried to reason with Special Agents Eric Wein and Alex Antes to no avail. “They were laughing at me, making fun of me,” said Oladukon. “They said, ‘You people come here and become terrorist.’ I said, ‘I am from Nigeria, how many African people are terrorists?’ It’s a false generalization. I was kind of trying to enlighten them.” Oladukon was taken to 26 Federal Plaza, and was locked there until night fall. Then he was transported to Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, where he would spend the next seven months in detention, before being transferred to Hudson County Jail for a further 3 1/2 months, and then deported back to Nigeria.

The Joint Terrorism Task Force only became interested in investigating Oladukon after the Maritime College administration had “contacted the JTTF because of what they believed to be suspicious behavior,” according to an Immigration and Naturalization Services (now the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) report dated March 6, 2003. Such tips were encouraged by the U.S. government and became commonplace following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A new set of government policies regarding immigration and immigration law enforcement reintroduced de facto ethnic and national origin discrimination into the American immigration system for the first time in decades, according to civil rights defenders. In fact, they liken the government’s current policies to those initiated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919. In response to a series of terrorist acts attributed to left-wing anarchists and socialists, Palmer ordered federal agents to round up thousands of immigrants based on their ethnicity and their religion. Similarly, “What we saw after 9/11, especially towards immigrants, was the needless sacrifice of basic rights and liberties in the name of national security,” said Udi Ofer, director of the New York Bill of Rights Defense Campaign at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

In June 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft introduced the National Security Entry Exit Registration System (NSEERS), establishing a series of regulations and registration requirements. The one deemed most egregious by civil rights activists was Special Registration, requiring all male age 16 and older from 24 Arab and Muslim countries in addition to North Korea to register with the government and be fingerprinted, photographed and questioned. “Registration is a nice name for interrogation,” said Ofer. All those who failed to comply were potentially vulnerable to deportation and criminal penalties, including incarceration. Within the first year, 83,310 foreign nationals were registered and 13,740 of them were placed in deportation proceedings. None of the registrants were ever publicly charged with terrorism.

Since its implementation, the Special Registration program has not resulted in the identification of any terrorists and is emblematic of how many anti-terrorism policies following Sept. 11 are “delusional” and “counterproductive,” according to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center. “It was based on a kind of false premise of how terrorists operate,” he said. “It was more a paranoid reaction to the problems of 9/11 rather than anything that produced an effective response.”

The government also embarked on two rounds of interviews with the intention of questioning thousands of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men between the ages of 18 and 33 who had legally entered the United States on non-immigrant visas after Jan. 1, 2000. In November 2001, the government interviewed 5,000 individuals and in March 2002, an additional 3,000 were interviewed. “It was all on the theory that you shake the trees and then something might fall out of the trees,” said Cannistraro. “In fact, what it had was kind of the unintended consequence of turning people off who might have been helpful in providing leads and information. It scared the hell out of them.” The Department of Justice acknowledged it had no basis for suspecting any of these men had knowledge relevant to a terrorism investigation and both rounds failed to yield any results. Nevertheless, a third round of interviews was initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in October 2004, as part of a government-wide Interagency Security Plan intended to safeguard the U.S. presidential elections due the next month.

While the interviews were purported to be “voluntary,” the vast majority of individuals questioned felt they had to comply, according to a report released in February 2004 by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As a result, over 90 percent of the men voluntarily submitted to the questioning. “They felt if they don’t respond to the FBI then they have done something wrong or at least they are going to be perceived as having done something wrong,” said Ofer.

In late 2002, Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) was implemented. It was officially described as “a national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity.”

On Sept. 13, 2002, law enforcement authorities stopped three Muslim medical students on a Florida highway and searched them for 17 hours following a tip they received from Eunice Stone of Cartersville, Georgia. She reported to local police that she overheard the men – two were American citizens and the other had a valid student visa -- “laughing at Sept. 11” and plotting a terror attack. The authorities thoroughly searched the men’s car and verified their identities, as the entire incident was televised nationally by the media, before releasing the men without being charged.

While the frequency of such tips has subsided following the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, immigrants remain in fear of “citizen vigilance.” A report by the Washington D.C. based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee stated, “In a climate of generalized fear and suspicion of Arabs and Muslims, there is every reason to be concerned that any such program is likely to degenerate into a vehicle for systemizing the worst forms of prejudice.”

Nothing could better illustrate this than Oladukon’s ordeal. In February 2003, Oladukon had gotten into an argument with Dr. Kimberly Cline, Maritime College’s vice president, over his tuition. After his first year at the college, Oladukon had applied for in-state tuition and his application was successful. However, in the fall of 2002, Oladukon was notified that there had been "an administrative error about the approval" and Cline informed him that he would have to pay the difference between the in-state rate and the out-of-state rate for several prior semesters. “Dr. Cline on several occasions mentioned the threat that she could call INS,” said Oladukon, in response to his refusal to pay. “What does immigration have to do with this? She keeps on talking about immigration, but it has nothing to do with tuition.” Shortly after, the college called the Joint Terrorism Task Force alleging Oladukon had been involved in “suspicious activity.” According to an Immigration and Naturalization Services report by Special Agent Antes, Cline advised the agents on the same day they apprehended Oladukon that he was “in the process of being expelled.”

The Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating whether Oladukon’s certificates from his previous university, the Federal College of Fisheries and Marine Technology, in Lagos, Nigeria, were fraudulent or not. On March 3, 2003, the investigators could not gain access to the university because students were staging a protest. However, they saw the college’s student affairs officer and his colleague off campus, and both claimed that Oladukon’s documents were fraudulent, despite lacking access to the files to make such a determination. This presented sufficient justification to keep Oladukon in detention in New Jersey. The university provost later confirmed that Oladukon’s certificates were in fact genuine. Accordingly, the Joint Terrorism Task Force dropped their investigation of any terrorism-related charges.

On March 25, while Oladukon was in custody, Anna Gbur, assistant district counsel of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sent Cline a fax requesting information about Oladukon’s “continued status as a student.” The college’s “Suitability Board” was hastily convened the following morning, and a unanimous decision to expel Oladukon was reached by the three-member board. The decision was then faxed to Gbur that same day for use in a hearing before Immigration Court in Newark, New Jersey. His expulsion from the college rendered his student visa void and Oladukon was out-of-status. Accordingly, this became the justification for detaining him and eventually deporting him. “In a sense it was a set up,” said Michelle Munsat, Oladukon’s immigration attorney. “He couldn’t win, the way his situation was created by the university.”

The expulsion, however, was in clear violation of the college’s own procedure for expelling students, according to the rules established in the “Organization, Operation and Regulations Manual for Regiment Cadets.” Oladukon was neither notified nor able to attend the “Suitability Board” to defend himself as he was incarcerated at the time. Despite Cline having full knowledge of his detention, the Board was nonetheless convened. In fact, the written decision by the Board states that “Sulaiman was given the opportunity to appear before the Board, but he did not show up to the hearing.” Yet the notices that should have been delivered and signed by Oladukon remain blank.

Another violation according the College’s own procedures was the College president’s lack of active involvement in the disenrollment proceeding. However, the College alleges that the procedures that required the College president’s involvement were superseded by newer procedures adopted four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which no longer required the president’s involvement. “The disenrollment proceeding was a gross violation of Sulaiman’s due process rights,” said Jim Maloney, Oladukon’s attorney specifically handling the complaints against the College. “Obviously someone at the school was behind his deportation. There was a very flagrant violation with extreme consequences, and someone very carefully and calculatingly made it come to pass.”

Cline, and the College as a whole, has refused to comment on the case because of student privacy rules, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which prevent the College from disclosing certain information on their students. However, Sue Hynes, executive assistant to College President John Ryan, issued a statement that the allegations made against the College were false. “We at Maritime College have not demanded or arranged for the detention of any of our students, nor can we demand or cause the release of any student or former student who may be in the custody of federal law enforcement or immigration agencies,” read the statement. “We are rightly proud of Maritime College’s record of diversity in the recruitment and enrollment of international students into both undergraduate and graduate programs.”

Both of Oladukon’s attorneys are representing him pro bono, driven by a sense of outrage at the injustice he suffered. “What was done here was a horrible injustice,” said Maloney. “I mean somebody set this guy up, and took him down, and made him suffer a lot for basically being delinquent on an account.” At worst, the College should have withheld Oladukon’s transcripts until he paid the tuition he owed, reasoned Maloney. “That’s what they would have done to an American,” he said. “Do you think an American would have been locked up for 10 months? Why does somebody who is coming in from another country face such tremendous penalties for what would be entirely different for an American?” They fear Oladukon’s ordeal could set a precedent for the grave abuse of foreign students. “It could happen again,” said Maloney. “It could be the cookie cutter for anybody who runs a school where they have foreign students coming in and they want to have the specter of draconian penalties if all requirements are not meant.”

Detention took its toll on Oladukon. “Eleven months without breathing clean air, seeing the sun or touch the soil with my legs was unbearable,” said Oladukon, recalling his time in detention. “I do not know what effect this had or will eventually have on my future health.” While he was detained, Oladukon’s father passed away and this significantly depressed him. “The anguish of not touching or hugging loved ones and waking up every morning and sleeping at night with desperation is enough suffering to take the last living soul in my body,” he said. Since his deportation, Oladukon has been trying to rebuild his life, but it has been an uphill struggle. Despite nearly completing his four-year degree, Maritime College refused to issue Oladukon a diploma or to release his transcripts so that he may finish it elsewhere. “From an equitable perspective they should at least give him the transcripts and stop using that as additional enforcement,” said Maloney. Still, Oladukon has refused to give up and is currently working towards a master’s degree at Multimedia University in Malaysia.

“In a society that claims to be the champion of human rights and civilization, I was taken from an academic environment to an isolated environment because of hatred,” said Oladukon.

“The justice system in America is a complete lie. The people that are given power to maintain fairness are very hypocritical,” he said. “They use different kinds of tactics to waste people’s lives simply because their color is a little bit darker or because of Islam. I still can’t figure what offense Islam and being a black person has committed to these people.”