By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Chicago immigration attorney Yaser Tabbara has a client, a teenage boy from South Asia, who had to comply with the special registration rules set by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the wake of Sept. 11.

So Tabbara accompanied the boy, still a minor, and his mother to the office, where they waited nearly five hours before being processed. The boy was photographed, fingerprinted and questioned while all of his immigration documents were examined. Eventually, when the officials could find no reason to hold him, he was allowed to leave.

“He embraced me, and his mother was crying,” said Tabbara, who has a law degree from DePaul University and works with the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center. “This story had a happy ending, but many don’t, and it was so emotionally draining.”

Steps such as the special registration program—which applies to boys and men more than 16 years old from a list of 24 mostly Arab or Muslim countries and North Korea—have contributed to an atmosphere of fear in immigrant communities across the nation, according to leaders in the arena of immigration rights.

Catholic leaders have raised concerns about how such steps fit in with Christian duty to welcome the stranger, especially in a society born of immigrants

“The terrorist attack of Sept. 11 changed how we define ourselves as a nation,” Cardinal George said at a summit meeting organized by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights earlier this year. “Now everything is viewed through the lens of the war on terrorism. This paradigm shift for our immigrant nation causes us to view immigrants first with suspicion, before looking at how we can welcome them as neighbors.”

In Chicago, shoppers can see the result in the closed signs posted on what used to be Pakistani stores along Devon Avenue.

“There’s a lot more fear in immigrant communities,” said Fred Tsao, the immigration and citizenship director for the Illinois coalition, an organization partially funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Many immigrants—especially those from Arab or predominantly Muslim countries—have become afraid to engage in perfectly legal activities such as raising money for charities or contributing to legal defense funds for those who have been arrested, he said.

Undocumented workers—especially those working at airports—have been branded security risks, and are more likely to be deported, he said.

Kevin Appleby, the policy director for Migration and Refugee Services at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that much of what has been done since Sept. 11, including the special registration program and the enforcement of certain provisions of the Patriot Act, passed two months after the attack to expand law enforcement’s anti-terrorism powers, “borders on racial profiling.”

“These kinds of blanket policies don’t have the effect of rooting out terrorists, and in the end, they terrorize immigrant communities,” said Appleby, noting that law enforcement officers must develop good relationships with those same communities to get the intelligence they need to find real potential terrorists.

For example, he said, the special registration program has not turned up any terrorists, and likely won’t.

“A terrorist who was here to harm us probably wouldn’t show up to register,” he said.

And while the church recognizes sovereign nations’ rights to control their borders, it also says that all people must be accorded human dignity.

“Whether someone is documented or not, their human rights should From Page 5

be respected,” Appleby said. “They shouldn’t be detained for long periods of time, they shouldn’t be shackled, just because they are undocumented.”

For David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and volunteer attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington D.C., much of the problem boils down to the difference in the way U.S. citizens and foreign nationals have been treated.

Since Sept. 11, foreign nationals suspected of terrorism can be detained indefinitely, in secrecy, without their families even knowing where they are. When they do receive hearings, the trials are conducted in secret, said Cole, who addressed the issue at an April 14 gathering hosted by the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.

Under the Patriot Act, foreign nationals can be deported for having associated with terrorists—even if they did nothing wrong themselves and were unaware that they were associating with terrorists, Cole said. They can be kept from entering the United States based solely on their speech, if officials believe it undermines defense against terrorism (“And (Attorney General) John Ashcroft would say virtually everything I’ve said tonight would fit into that category,” Cole said) and they can be deported based on the attorney general’s certification that they are dangerous.

“It’s legitimate to ask if there are liberties we can give up if it will make us safer,” Cole said. “But we haven’t been asked to make that judgment. What the government has asked us is a much easier choice: How about if we sacrifice their liberties?”