The Great Immigrant Crackdown

Ed. note: This is an abridged excerpt from Tram Nguyen's book "We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories From Immigrant Communities After 9/11." (Beacon Press, 2005).

In March 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ban Al-Wardi's parents received a phone call from the Los Angeles police. The LAPD wanted to set up an interview for the Iraqi-American family with the FBI. A few days later, without notice, agents appeared at their door asking for Al-Wardi's father. Her mother asked the agents to meet him at his office instead, where he was a doctor in private practice. When she offered to give them the address, the agents said not to bother, they already had it.

Al-Wardi went to her father's office to tell him the men were coming, but they were already there. Two men with tape recorders introduced themselves as FBI agents and said that they were there to help. During times of war, unfortunately, they said, some communities are targeted. They wanted the Al-Wardis to know that they could call on the FBI for protection.

"Then they pulled out this file on my father. It had his picture, his immigration documents," Ban Al-Wardi recalled.

The agents pulled out pages and pages of what turned out to be a list of questions. Where were you born? What was your father's name? And your grandfather's name? Do you own weapons? Do you own weapons of mass destruction? Like chemical poison or lethal gas? Do you know anyone with access to weapons like this? Have you ever taken flight school courses or have you ever flown a plane? Do you know any Iraqi Americans living in the U.S. now who do fly planes? When was the last time you went to Iraq? Do you consider Iraq your home? Where is home for you? Would you bear arms to fight for this country?

They produced a map of Iraq and taped it to the wall, asking Al-Wardi's father to point out cities where he thought it would be possible for weapons of mass destruction to be hidden. The interview lasted two hours.

"My parents used to be very active, they used to go to all the demonstrations against the war. They had protested the Afghanistan invasion and they've been very vocal. But since that time, my mom doesn't go to any demonstrations. My father goes but he doesn't want to bring attention to himself. He even disguises himself," she said, with a short laugh. "He wears a baseball cap and sunglasses, and turns up his collar. He doesn't want people taking pictures of him."

The FBI visited up to 11,000 Iraqi Americans as the war in Iraq began, according to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Billed as "voluntary interviews," they were part of a series of such visits that had begun in November 2001. The first phase involved 5,000 men from countries suspected of having Al-Qaeda presence; a second phase began in March 2002 with interviews of 3,000 more men. A year later, the General Accounting Office found that none of the information from these interviews had been analyzed, while about 20 of the interviewees had been arrested for immigration charges.

As an immigration attorney, Ban Al-Wardi was no stranger to the consequences of FBI surveillance. She represented two Muslim leaders from Anaheim's large Arab community whose cases symbolized the growing dangers of "guilt by association." One was a well-known Egyptian cleric, Imam Wagdy Mohamed Ghoneim of the Islamic Institute of Orange County, who was arrested in November 2004 and charged with overstaying his religious-worker visa. After having a heart attack in the San Pedro detention facility, Ghoneim chose deportation.

The other case involved Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, the Palestinian founder of an Anaheim mosque. Hamdan was arrested in July 2004 for his association with the Holy Land Foundation. He had worked as a fundraiser for the Dallas-based charity, which became the first to be shut down by the government in 2001 for alleged ties to Hamas. In 2002, Hamdan agreed to travel to Dallas at the request of the FBI to answer questions about Holy Land. Soon after he agreed, agents knocked at his door at four in the morning. He was brought to San Pedro's Terminal Island, and kept there on the basis of a Patriot Act provision that allows indefinite detention if the government can show "reasonable grounds" of a threat to national security.