American Muslims 18 years after 9/11 – Page 3
The fight over Trump’s travel ban continues a year after Supreme Court ruling
In June, a year after the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting travel here from certain countries — widely criticized as a “Muslim ban” — activists are still fighting it in the courts and many families remain separated. The travel ban, issued in September 2017, blocked immigrants from traveling to the United States from five mostly Muslim countries.
A year ago, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, upheld the third and most recent version of the ban, which does not apply only to Muslim countries, as constitutional. The policy indefinitely restricts U.S. entry by citizens of Iran, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.
At least 40,000 Somalis currently live in Columbus, the second-largest population of Somalis in the United States after Minneapolis. Trump has defended the ban, saying it’s important for the national security of the United States. “In this era of worldwide terrorism and extremist movements bent on harming innocent civilians, we must properly vet those coming into our country,” Trump said in a prepared statement after the Supreme Court’s decision.
He criticized Democrats “who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.” Advocates for immigrants and Muslims say the president hasn’t shown how the ban helps security.
“The government has still not demonstrated why giving an 82-year-old woman from Yemen a visa to come here will somehow jeopardize the security of this country,” said Romin Iqbal, executive and legal director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations Columbus.
Rep. Chu, Sen. Murphy Reintroduce Bicameral Bill to Block Muslim Ban Implementation
In January, Rep. Judy Chu (CA-27) and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) have each introduced companion bills in the House and Senate to block the implementation of President Trump’s executive order blocking travel from majority Muslim countries.
The bills, HR 810 and S. 246, would prohibit the use of any funds or fees to implement Executive Order 13780, signed on March 6, 2017. Rep. Chu and Sen. Murphy, along with House and Senate original cosponsors Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CA-19) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), issued the following statements: “I will never forget the chaos and pain created by the first Muslim Ban. Nor will I forget the crowds of lawyers and families who came to protest at airports,” said Rep. Chu. “The Muslim Ban – now in its third iteration, but wrong in any form – is just one of the weapons Donald Trump is using to foment xenophobia and bigotry and drive wedges in our communities. It is simply unamerican. We do not create policies based on religious animus and we do not target people because of who they worship.”
“Two years ago, after President Trump announced his hateful Muslim ban, I heard from families across Connecticut who feared they would never see their loved ones again. But the proposed ban wasn't just a threat the families affected by it – it threatened the very idea of America. We are made stronger – and safer – by embracing our diversity,” said Senator Murphy.
“President Trump’s travel ban is inherently discriminatory. It does nothing to make us safer and causes real pain and hardship for American families who remain separated from loved ones, even if they are sick or dying.,” said Senator Feinstein. “Our bill would assert Congress’ oversight authority and block this unnecessary, discriminatory policy.”
127 civil advocacy groups urge nation's political parties to repeal Trump’s Muslim Ban
In April, a coalition of 127 national and state civil advocacy groups issued an open letter addressed to the heads of national political parties, calling on them to include repealing the Muslim Ban and reversing the historic-low cap on admitted refugees as signature issues in their 2020 party platforms.
The joint letter came in advance of the 2020 national party conventions held by the Democratic, Republican, Green, and Libertarian Parties. During these conventions each political party updates their party platform, embodying the principles and strategic goals of the party for the next four years. It may be recalled that on June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled in favor of the third iteration of President Donald Trump’s travel ban (known as Muslim Ban 3.0) on five Muslim countries.
The current ban, announced in September 2017, prohibits entry into the US by most people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim majority countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families.
In his decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Trump had used his executive authority to “suspend entry of aliens into the United States.” “The [order] is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices,” Roberts wrote. “The text says nothing about religion.”
On the positive note
California judge vacates conviction in 13-year-old Lodi terror case of Hamid Hayat
In a stunning decision in July, the Senior United States District Judge Garland Burrell Jr., who oversaw the trial and conviction of accused Lodi terror suspect Hamid Hayat 13 years ago in 2006 has ordered the conviction and sentence vacated. Burrell’s decision comes seven months after U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes issued a 116-page recommendation to Burrell that the conviction be vacated because of ineffective representation by his original defense attorney, a woman who at the time had never tried a criminal case in federal court. Barnes’ recommendation followed weeks of testimony in a 2018 hearing in which his attorney hammered home his contention that the FBI had coerced Hayat into false confessions, that the training camp he supposedly visited was not even open at the time he was in Pakistan and that alibi witnesses who could prove his innocence were not produced at the original trial.
Hayat had been accused of attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and planning to wage jihad on the United States. Hayat, who was born in San Joaquin County in 1982, had visited Pakistan with his family in 2003 on what his lawyers say was a trip for his mother to receive medical treatment and to find a wife for him. But Hayat had come to the attention of a paid government informant who can be heard on wiretaps urging Hayat to attend such a camp. His appellate lawyers say that despite his confession – which came after hours of questioning by the FBI and is now the subject of a Netflix documentary – he never went to a camp. They also say the one he was alleged to have attended was not open at the time he was in Pakistan.
The case made national headlines when federal officials announced they had broken up an al-Qaida cell in Lodi, where at one point agents suspected Osama bin Laden’s No. 2 man – Ayman al-Zawahiri – supposedly had been seen. Hayat’s defense team dismissed that notion as a fantasy created by the informant, but federal prosecutors have fought for years to keep Hayat’s conviction from being overturned, noting repeatedly that he confessed.
The FBI’s terrorism watch list violates the Constitution, says federal judge
On Sept 4, a federal judge ruled that an FBI watch list of more than 1 million “known or suspected terrorists” violates the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens in the database. The decision from U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia in favor of 23 Muslim Americans who sued over their inclusion in the Terrorist Screening Database found that the watch list infringes on their constitutional right to due process.
Trenga noted that the list restricts their ability to fly and engage in everyday activities and backed the plaintiffs’ concerns that they were flagged secretly and without a clear methodology.
“An individual’s placement into the [watch list] does not require any evidence that the person engaged in criminal activity, committed a crime, or will commit a crime in the future,” the judge wrote, “and individuals who have been acquitted of a terrorism-related crime may still be listed.”
The Washington Post said the ruling could reshape the government’s process for a watch list that has long been criticized for inaccuracy and described by opponents as “a Muslim registry created in the wake of the widespread Islamophobia of the early 2000s.”
The watch list encompasses nearly 1.2 million people, including about 4,600 U.S. citizens or residents, as of June 2017.
In February, the federal government had acknowledged that it shares its terrorist watchlist with more than 1,400 private entities, including hospitals and universities, prompting concerns from civil libertarians that those mistakenly placed on the list could face a wide variety of hassles in their daily lives.
The government’s admission that it shares the list so broadly comes after years of insistence that the list is generally not shared with the private sector.
Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has filed a constitutional challenge to the government’s use of the watchlist, called the government’s admission shocking. “We’ve always suspected there was private-sector dissemination of the terror watchlist, but we had no idea the breadth of the dissemination would be so large,” Abbas said.
The watchlist is supposed to include only those who are known or suspected terrorists but contains hundreds of thousands of names.
The government’s admission comes in a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Alexandria by Muslims who say they regularly experience difficulties in travel, financial transactions and interactions with law enforcement because they have been wrongly added to the list.
Interestingly, in July the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) requiring a report on the dissemination of the federal government’s watchlist to more than 60 foreign countries.
The amendment was introduced by Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and requires the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of State to submit a report to Congress detailing various guidelines governing the government’s dissemination of the watchlist.
The FBI has acknowledged in sworn testimony that it takes no responsibility for, nor does it oversee, how foreign governments actually use U.S. watchlist information.
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