Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2003 Student Work

Fitting the Profile After 9/11: Muslim, Male and an Illegal Alien

By Seema Gupta

Muslim, male and an illegal alien.

Faisal Ulvie’s immigration status was the official reason for his arrest in 2002, after he had lived in America for seven years, but his “profile” as a Muslim man from Pakistan made him a prime target for detention in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

At around 6 a.m. on Nov. 8, immigration officers and the police entered Ulvie’s one-bedroom apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, without a warrant, and arrested him. His wife, Nadine Young-Ulvie, an American citizen of Dominican descent, was taking a shower. Two of her children from a previous marriage were already awake while Ulvie lay in bed with the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Shaheen Ulvie. The police entered the bathroom and Young-Ulvie was forced to dress in front of the officers while they checked her husband's fingerprints. Her daughters started to cry and her son pleaded with police not to take his father away as Young-Ulvie gave her husband a last hug and a kiss. The officers didn't let him hug his children, she said.

This was just the beginning of the nightmare for the Ulvie family.

"Where are my rights? What am I supposed to tell my children? That their Daddy is never coming home? Where's the justice?" said Young-Ulvie as she broke down crying 10 days after the arrest, when she received a call from her husband late one night telling her that that he had been told to collect all his belongings. They suspected that he was being sent back to Pakistan.

Sitting in her living room, her eyes bloodshot from a lack of sleep and many hours in tears, Young-Ulvie wanted to know how long this was going to continue. Her 9-year-old son was withdrawn, her 7-year old daughter cried every time she saw her mother weep and the youngest, a toddler, kept asking for her father.

“I feel upset that as a citizen and his legal wife, I was not informed that he was going to be deported,” said Young-Ulvie.

Convinced that this was a case of racial profiling, Young-Ulvie said that although her husband was illegal, this was his only crime. In the seven years he was here, she said, he had obtained a social security number and New York State I.D. No one had ever questioned him and he has no criminal record, not even a traffic ticket, she said.

Yet after the terrorist attacks, he's suddenly seen as a danger, even though he's married to an American, with American children, said Young-Ulvie, pushing back her wiry black hair into its neat bun.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice has questioned and detained hundreds of people in connection with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Almost all of these "special interest" detainees are Muslim men, according to the international human rights group Amnesty International, which also estimates that there have been at least 1,200 Muslim non-citizens detained. The largest group of detainees was from Pakistan, like Ulvie.

"We are standing firm in our commitment to protect American lives," U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in the weeks following the terrorist attacks, after issuing an edict allowing the INS to detain immigrants. "The Department of Justice is waging a deliberate campaign of arrest and detention to protect American lives."

The exact number of people detained and their identities has not been made public. While there isn't a gag order placed on the detainees themselves, the information has been kept secret in the interest of security, according to the Attorney General.

"I do not think it is responsible for us, in a time of war, when our objective is to save American lives, to advertise to the opposing side that we have al-Qaida membership in custody," Ashcroft said.

If it is protecting American lives, this procedure is also splitting families and causing trauma and fear among the lives of immigrants, said Bobby Khan, who runs the Coney Island Avenue Project, a community group that assists Muslim immigrants. He believes that as many as 4,500 Muslims have been detained and said that the number provided by human rights groups is conservative.

"Every day I am hearing cases of intimidation within the Muslim and South Asian community," said Khan as he sits at the solitary table in his one-room office on Brooklyn's Coney Island Avenue, home to a large Muslim population.

The arrests and detentions are based on nationality, religion and gender and are a form of racial profiling, according to Human Rights Watch. In this process, there have also been sub-trends, said Khan. Right after Sept.11 2001, people mostly of Muslim or Middle Eastern descent were picked up randomly as material witnesses. By March 2002, the targets were immigrants, mainly Muslim, who had overstayed their visas, had papers pending or were here illegally, said Khan. Now, more than a year after the attacks, men from Muslim or Middle Eastern majority countries are required to register with the INS or face arrest. Each step marked the erosion of an open civil society, he said.

"These men find it so harassing to comply with the programs and are treated so inhumanely," said Khan. "A vast majority of them are in removal proceedings."

This isn't the first time in U.S. history that legal steps have been taken against an immigrant community. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law restricting immigration into America, declaring the Chinese as ineligible for naturalization and suspending all Chinese immigration. Although the Chinese composed only 0.002 percent of America's population at the time, the U.S. Congress passed the act to placate workers’ demands to curb foreign labor and meet concerns about maintaining white "racial purity." It wasn't till 1943 that the Chinese became eligible for citizenship.

During periods of economic or political turmoil immigrant communities often have to face hostility in the United States. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russian and Eastern European immigrants were deported if they were found to be communists or anarchists in an anti-Red crusade. During World War II, in 1942, 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent had their homes and other property, confiscated and were interned in camps until the end of the war, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. In the 1950s, during another Red scare, the Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogated foreigners if they were believed to be involved in "subversive" activities.

Today, it is mainly Islamic immigrant communities that are being targeted as the United States fights the threat of terrorism. Since the Sept.11 attacks, basic human rights protections and civil liberties have steadily eroded, according to the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, pointing to the monitoring, registration, detention and deportation of these immigrants.

On the night before his scheduled deportation, Ulvie called his wife, who together with Bobby Khan and a lawyer rushed to the Hudson County Detention Center in New Jersey, and waited outside in the rain till 5 a.m. to see what they could do to stop the process. He was scheduled to depart at 11:15 a.m. the next day, but his lawyer managed to appeal to a judge to hear the details of the case in the waning hours before his scheduled flight back to Pakistan. In 10 days in detention, Ulvie had not had a single day in court. In Ulvie's defense, they noted that although the INS claims to have sent a deportation letter to him in 1995, he had never received it and he had since married an American. At the eleventh hour, the judge called the cell phone of an immigration officer on the airliner, telling him to allow Ulvie to stay in the country.

"I was lucky, I was blessed, it was written in my faith," said Ulvie, now more than four months after his release from detention. He saw the experience as a test of his faith. He had been chained at his waist, hands and feet, taking only one step at a time as he approached the aircraft that was taking him away from his family, he said. Yet a call came at the very last minute. "It made me closer to God and gave my family back to me," he said.

In the two months he spent in the detention center waiting for his case to be heard in immigration court, Ulvie prayed five times a day and says his spirit was awakened. It was the only weapon he had, he said.

He lived in cell that was two by two meters (yards), was often strip-searched and had to wear an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves even though the room was chilled by air-conditioning. He was provided with meals that he said were not halal, that is, prepared in accordance with certain religious requirements for Muslims. Although he was in detention during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, he was not given the meals at the correct times for him to maintain his daytime fast. In two months, this 6-foot-2-inch former martial arts expert was down from 180 to 160 pounds.

This was the experience shared by a vast majority of the men detained after the Sept. 11 attacks, at the detention centers in New Jersey and in New York, according to Human Rights Watch. These were cases of racial profiling, said the human rights organization, and Ulvie agrees.

"If you see the case, why didn't they come get me in 1996, 1997 or 1998," said Ulvie as he sat in his Bushwick home dressed in a baseball jersey and track pants. "It must have been because it was after 9/11, to judge me on my religion."

The INS eventually found the deportation letter that they had sent Ulvie in 1995, returned undelivered. This and the testimonies of his family members as well as friends and colleagues eventually convinced the judge to let Ulvie out on bail. It was determined that there was enough "bona fide evidence of a marriage and a family" for Ulvie to file an I-30 application, a marriage petition to stay in the United States. He also made provisions to pay back all the taxes he owed the city and state including interest. His final hearing with an immigration judge is scheduled next month, where he expects to receive approval of his green card application.

These arrests, detentions and the requirement for special registration of these Muslim men were supposed to curb suspected terrorists, but now appear to cover just about anyone, said Janet Sabel, the head of the immigration unit of the Legal Aid Society. Most of the immigrants come to the United States with valid visas but allow them to lapse and they eventually end up staying in the country undocumented, but employed. Up until Sept. 11, 2001, these immigrants were tolerated, she said. Most of them did the work that Americans would rather not do, she said, like making the beds in New York City's hotels, as well as the work of delivery people or street vendors.

"It's probably been the case for the past 20 years. They have broken immigration laws but they were under the assumption that it was OK," said Sabel. "While they did violate their visas, all these people and communities are also supporting the economy."

The detentions and requirements for special registration are instead causing a climate of fear among these immigrant groups, according to organizations working with Muslim and South Asian immigrant communities.

The detentions are unlikely to change, due to the support they receive from the American public. A survey conducted by Cornell University in January 2003 found that 68 percent of Americans surveyed supported random checks based on racial profiling of suspects. About 57 percent supported the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists.

For the Ulvies, it seems as if their nightmare is coming to an end, but the events over the past six months have had a lasting impact on their lives. In their Bushwick apartment, Ulvie sits in the bedroom with his 2-year-old daughter on his lap, as her big brown eyes look up adoringly at her father. She clutches tightly on to his sleeve, not wanting to let go. His 9-year-old son comes into the room cluttered with laundry hanging from the walls, to tell his father he is going out to play. The boy is doing badly at school, said Ulvie, and remains distracted by what his father is still going through.

"He still thinks the authorities are going to take me away," said Ulvie.

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