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Controversy About Really Deporting Aliens After Deportation Orders
It really all began one sunny May morning in Tampa, Florida in 1997. Three Federal agents, one each from the INS, the FBI and the U.S. Customs Service, teamed up to knock on the apartment door of Mazen Al-Najjar. He answered, and the agents proceeded to serve a duly issued INS Form I-200 Warrant of Arrest in Deportation Proceedings. Al-Najjar was taken into custody without incident that morning, but the arrest would begin a chain of events that would garner international media attention, ibecome an issue in a Presidential election and have ramifications on the nationâs War on Terror. Why was Al-Najjarâs arrest so significant? Al-Najjar had been identified in the ongoing Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) investigation in Tampa that began, at least on the criminal side, in late 1994 after the airing of the PBS special Jihad in America. Al-Najjar was an alien who was in the United States illegally, and he had been placed under deportation proceedings before his arrest that day in May but not detained. That was not an unusual practice, since there was pending litigation against him at the Immigration Court level. (His wife, also unlawfully in the U.S., and American citizen kids lived with him in Tampa.) Once the Immigration Court ruled against Al-Najjar (and his wife), and ordered them deported, that changed his status from the perspective of the government. He was, at that point, an alien who had been found deportable by a judge and who had been denied all relief from deportation. Additionally, the government developed no shortage of evidence against Al-Najjar, linking him to the PIJ and other PIJ operatives. Some of that evidence was information the government did not want to reveal then because further investigation was continuing against other suspects, and some of it was classified. A decision was made to detain Al-Najjar after the deportation order was entered against him by the Immigration Court, and to seek his continued detention, in part, based upon the submission of certain classified information to the Court. This was a rarely utilized process in deportation proceedings. However, it was entirely legal. What some of the government folks underestimated at the time was the extent of the reaction utilizing such a process would have among certain groups. Individuals and organizations sympathetic to Al-Najjar very quickly picked up the use of âsecret evidenceâ as a cause celebreâ, and the circus began. ..... read the entire article Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-03-25 |
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