Arab "Registry" Upheld; Policy About Immigration, Not Counter-Terrorism

More than 140,000 Arabs and Muslims in the United States were forced to register with the government after the September 11 attacks in a heavy-handed effort to keep terrorists out of the country. The registration scheme did not uncover any terrorists, but it did find some 13,000 immigration violators, who were then deported.

Last week a New York appeals court upheld the program. The court ruled unequivocally that the U.S. Justice Department had the authority to enforce the so-called National Entry-Exit Registration Scheme (NSEERS) that was set up in 2002, and to deport anyone who ran afoul of its rules. Constitutionally, the court was right; in every other respect -- economically, diplomatically, and morally, it was wrong.

Of all the programs set up after 9/11 with the goal of catching terrorists on U.S. soil, none was more ill-conceived than NSEERS. It set out special rules for most male visitors from two dozen Arab and Muslim countries, requiring lengthy security screenings before they came to the United States and forcing them to register with the government again if they spent more than a month here. Citizens of those countries living here already without green cards were also required to register, and if they were found to be out of immigration status, they were deported. While the special registration requirements were abolished at the end of 2003, much of the program remains in place today.

Imad Daou, a young Christian from Lebanon, is just one of thousands -- none of whom has ever been shown to have any connection to terrorism -- who got caught out by the scheme. I met Daou this spring in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, a violent border city that has been crippled by the drug wars. It was the last place Daou ever expected to end up when he left his home in Beirut in July of 2003 to come to Texas A & M International University (TAMIU) to do a master's degree in computer science.

TAMIU is in Laredo, only a few miles from the border with Mexico. During his first weekend at the school, he was standing at a bus stop when he met Maria Guadelupe Garcia, a Mexican-American who was studying for her master's in international business at TAMIU and teaching at a Laredo high school. He seemed, as she later put it, "lost and in great need of help"; the bus he was waiting for did not run on the weekends. She later invited him to attend Catholic mass with her and other students from the university dorms. They fell in love, and got engaged, with plans to marry when the academic term ended in the spring of 2004.

In November, 2003, she decided to make it official with her family. First, she introduced him to her parents in Del Rio, Texas and then, with the easy informality that had long connected both sides of the border, they crossed the Rio Grande into Acuna, Mexico to meet her sister and to invite her to a Thanksgiving dinner in Texas the next day. The two had already been to Mexico several times together and had faced no problems coming back. But when they returned to the border after a two-hour visit, the U.S. inspector looked at Daou's Lebanese passport, checked in his computer system and determined that Daou had failed to register with the U.S. government after 30 days as was required under NSEERS.

Rather than simply issuing him a stern warning and forcing him to register, the U.S. border inspectors slapped him in handcuffs and hauled him off to a prison in Laredo. He would spend the next two months in jail, and in January, 2004 he and Maria were married in the prison just before Daou was deported back to Lebanon. As a deportee, he was automatically banned from returning to the United States for at least five years under harsh laws passed in 1996, following the first, unsuccessful terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers. Desperate to get him back, Maria moved across the border to Nuevo Laredo, and after a year of e-mails and long distance telephone calls to Lebanon, she was able to get permission from the Mexican government to bring him to live with her in Mexico.