Immigration Law as Anti-Terrorism Tool

"Immigration Law as Anti-Terrorism Tool"

Perhaps you saw today's front-page article in the Washington Post:

Whereas terrorism charges can be difficult to prosecute, Homeland Security officials say immigration laws can provide a quick, easy way to detain people who could be planning attacks. Authorities have also used routine charges such as overstaying a visa to deport suspected supporters of terrorist groups.

Once everybody gets finished muttering, "Well, so the Bush administration is finally doing something right," I should point out that this paragraph isn't the lead, though it is the lede. It's actually paragraph number six.

Paragraphs one through five are a sympathetic portrayal of a poor Lebanese fellow who was arrested by a vicious, arrogant, masked Federal agent in a surprise raid on his home. Grim's Hall hates that: police should neither be allowed to wear masks, nor conduct military-style raids. Nevertheless, they do.

Paragraphs eight through ten are given over to "Muslim civil liberties activists" who charge the following: "They argue that authorities are enforcing minor violations by Muslims and Arabs, while ignoring millions of other immigrants who flout the same laws."

Paragraphs eleven through sixteen point out that Muslims were rarely the focus of immigration law before 9/11. Ahem. You don't say. (There is also a note to the effect that certain roundups have been "controversial," and there is a gratuitous description of our intelligence and law-enforcement services as inhabiting a "murky" world.)

There follows then a long series of paragraphs providing another sympathetic portrayal of a poor Muslim immigrant who came under Federal scrutiny for donating to one of bin Laden's charities. She claims she is innocent, and perhaps she is; but the government, heavy-handed thugs that they are, decided after watching a few jetliners slam into our buildings that they wanted to be sure.

Finally, toward the bottom of page three, someone from DHS is actually allowed to respond to the charge: "Are you thugs targeting Muslims?"

In the interest of balance, they are permitted to cite two success stories to go with the two examples proposed by the Post at the beginning. Here we are:

For example, Nuradin Abdi, a Somali immigrant living in Ohio, was locked up on an asylum-fraud charge in November 2003. He was subsequently charged with plotting with an al Qaeda member to blow up a shopping mall. He has pleaded not guilty.

ICE officials also point to cases in which they have deported active supporters of terrorist groups, including at least two men who had attended guerrilla training camps in Pakistan.

That's all that is said about these cases, after two and a half pages of intense beating on DHS for the two cases the Post didn't like.

There are two more pages in the article. The first one is devoted to the government's case, which is presented thus: 'It's hard to charge people with terrorism, but we can easily deport them if they've violated immigration law. National security is "guesswork," so we're doing our best with what we've got; and anyway, we ignored counterterrorism in the 1990s, and look how that worked out!'

The last page, to bring the article to a circle, is devoted to another sympathetic portrayal of a Muslim immigrant.

I am left drawing these conclusions:

1) The Post is opposed to using immigration law to address counterterrorism issues, on the grounds that it might not be completely fair to all parties involved.

2) The Post, while willing to conceed that these national security issues exist, weighs the whole mess of those issues as being somewhat less important than the handful of cases anti-enforcement advocates pointed out to them. The Post dwells on those cases for three and a half pages of the five page article. It gives less than two paragraphs to the cases cited as successes by DHS, plus another paragraph to a third case later on.

3) Neither the Post, nor the anti-enforcement advocates for whom it is carrying water, actually intend this claim to be taken seriously: "They argue that authorities are enforcing minor violations by Muslims and Arabs, while ignoring millions of other immigrants who flout the same laws." This is not a call to enforce immigration law in an evenhanded fashion.

It is a call to stop enforcing immigration law at all.