The Guardian: “Registry used to track Arabs and Muslims dismantled by Obama administration”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that it is dismantling the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), the outdated and discriminatory registration program that required certain immigrants from twenty-five Muslim-majority, Arab, and South Asian countries to register their presence in the US. The final publication of this DHS rule to fully terminate the NSEERS program is the latest move from the Obama administration to place roadblocks in the way of President-Elect Trump, who has threatened to prevent non-citizen Muslims from entering the US and keep them under surveillance inside the US.

As the Guardian explains, the NSEERS program was “one of the most contentious—and widely hated—elements of the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies in the wake of 9/11. More than 80,000 people from 25 listed countries, 24 of which had majority Muslim or Arab populations, were forced onto the scheme in which they were required to provide fingerprints and a photograph and periodically present themselves for in-person interviews with DHS officers.”

Although about 14,000 of those registered individuals were placed into removal deportation proceedings, none were prosecuted for any terrorist activities. Mohammad Jafar Alam, a member of the South Asian social justice group Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) which actively campaigned to dismantle NSEEERS, says he knows from personal experience how it affected individuals and families. “The extreme mental, emotional distress, the financial problems, the pressures on a family and the isolation that happens is a punishment not just for one person, but everyone involved,” he tells the Guardian.

Joanne Lin, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which also strongly opposed NSEERS, says it was a “completely failed counterterrorism program. Out of 80,000 men who registered for it, there was not a single terrorism prosecution, yet it alienated Muslim and South Asian communities across the country.”

After DHS and FBI officials concluded it was discriminatory and ineffective, NSEERS was discontinued in 2011. But since the framework for the registry remained in place, the incoming Trump administration could have easily re-instated the program by putting majority-Muslim countries back onto the list. President-Elect Trump has called for a ban on all non-citizen Muslims entering the US, and he has also said he would enact “extreme vetting” for migrants and immigrants from countries deemed to be a terrorism threat. Kris Kobach, the secretary of state for Kansas and one of the original architects of NSEERS, who has been advising the Trump transition team on immigration and anti-terrorism issues, proposed last month that his priority for the DHS would be to “update and reimplement” the NSEERS program. By fully terminating the NSEERS program, the Obama administration is attempting to force Trump to undergo the formal notice-and-comment rulemaking process to implement a similar program; however, “there are certainly ways the Trump administration could impose this rule or a similar one without going through notice and comment,” American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) President William Stock tells Bloomberg BNA. “I think there will be parts of the Republican Party who will want to overcome this action by the administration,” he says.

In a statement, AILA says the NSEERS program “led to notorious ethnic profiling and civil rights violations.” Additionally, AILA’s members represented thousands of individuals required to register and witnessed how unjust the program was and how it brought shame to law-abiding individuals. Clients who tried to comply and voluntarily appeared for registration were treated like criminals and subjected to aggressive practices, including being handcuffed, denied access to attorneys, and put in detention. AILA Executive Director Benjamin Johnson says:

It is hard to quantify the immense negative impact NSEERS had on the fabric of our nation. It upended the lives of tens of thousands of business owners, scientists, and family members who were lawfully present in the United States, and all the while it failed miserably as a counterterrorism tool…Rescinding the regulation is a recognition that a dark chapter in our country's history can and should be closed, once and for all.

Royce Murray, Policy Director at the American Immigration Council agrees: “While we can all agree that national security must be a priority, the NSEERS registration program was widely regarded as an ineffective and obsolete counterterrorism tool. The next administration should not repeat the mistakes of the past and institute any discriminatory registry.”

Professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights clinic at Pennsylvania State University, believes that rescinding the NSEERS structure will make Trump’s plans more difficult. “At the very least it is going to take time,” she tells the Guardian. “At most it will take a whole lot of time, as it will force the Trump administration to introduce a rule change that could be open to public comment and legal challenge.” Wadhia adds: “This is the best Christmas present I could have asked for."

The Guardian: “Typecast as a terrorist”

Riz Ahmed, a Pakistani-British actor and rapper who struggled as a young actor to find work beyond two-dimensional stereotypical roles and who faced nearly constant interrogation and difficulty flying internationally after acting in such films as The Road to Guantanamo and Four Lions, says that airports and auditions are quite similar. In both, he is trying to play a fully realized three-dimensional character to an audience—producers and casting agents and immigration and security officers—who can’t get past the color of his skin and his “Muslim-sounding” name. Ahmed says:

You see, the pitfalls of the audition room and the airport interrogation room are the same. They are places where the threat of rejection is real. They are also places where you are reduced to your marketability or threat-level, where the length of your facial hair can be a deal-breaker, where you are seen, and hence see yourself, in reductive labels – never as “just a bloke called Dave”.  

Ahmed’s difficulty at airports—he was once illegally detained at Luton Airport where British intelligence officers insulted, threatened, and attacked him—echoes the treatment that many other Asians receive when traveling internationally, including actor Shah Rukh Khan, the “King of Bollywood,” who has been repeatedly detained at US immigration and who famously said: "Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself, I always take a trip to America. The immigration guys kick the star out of stardom."

After Ahmed’s experience at Luton airport—where he was illegally detained after having just won a film award for a movie about illegal detention—he wrote a song called “Post 9/11 Blues,” which included lyrics such as: “We’re all suspects so watch your back / I farted and got arrested for a chemical attack.”

In an airport holding pen, Ahmed explains, with few exceptions there are twenty slight variations of his own face, “like a Bollywood remake of Being John Malkovich. It was a reminder: you are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens; you are a signifier before you are a person; you are back at stage one.” He adds: 

The holding pen also had that familiar audition room fear. Everyone is nervous, but the prospect of solidarity is undercut by competition. In this situation, you’re all fighting to graduate out of a reductive purgatory and into some recognition of your unique personhood. In one way or another you are all saying: “I’m not like the rest of them.”

With his passport stamped with visas and entries to such countries as Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, Ahmed found himself being questioned again and again. These “airport auditions” included such questions as “Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?” and although so far they have always been successful in the end, “they involved the experience of being typecast, and when that happens enough, you internalize the role written for you by others. Now, like an over-eager method actor, I was struggling to break character.”

As he becomes better known (he has been featured recently in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, HBO’s The Night Of, and the latest Jason Bourne movie), his experience at US airports becomes smoother. Now he is often able to find the additional airport baggage search and questioning “hilarious rather than bruising.”  

“But this isn’t a success story,” he says. “I see most of my fellow Malkoviches still arched back, spines bent to snapping as they try to limbo under that rope. These days it’s likely that no one resembles me in the waiting room for an acting audition, and the same is true of everyone being waved through with me at US immigration. In both spaces, my exception proves the rule.”

NY Times: “Inshallah Is Good for Everyone”

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a college student at UC Berkeley and a refugee from Iraq, was about to take off on a flight from Los Angeles to Oakland when he called his uncle to tell him about a dinner event he attended the previous evening featuring U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. As he spoke to his uncle in Arabic, he noticed one passenger staring at him, and after Makhzoomi hung up, he was escorted off the plane and questioned by the airline and FBI about "threatening comments,” according to a statement by Southwest Airlines.

Although Southwest Airline’s statement claimed that Makhzoomi was removed for the “content of the passenger’s conversation” and not his language choice, Makhzoomi believes it was a clear case of discrimination and Islamaphobia. What did he say before the passenger alerted the airline? Apart from telling his uncle about the event, where he was able to ask the secretary-general a question about defeating ISIS, he explained, he signed off with the Arabic expression “inshallah,” which translates as “God willing.”

Wajahat Ali, author of the play The Domestic Crusaders and creative director of Affinis Labs, a hub for social entrepreneurship and innovation, elucidates the meaning of “inshallah” and its general use for Arabic speakers, calling it the “hallmark of the Arabic vernacular.” He writes:

Inshallah is the Arabic version of “fuggedaboudit.” It’s similar to how the British use the word “brilliant” to both praise and passive-aggressively deride everything and everyone. It transports both the speaker and the listener to a fantastical place where promises, dreams and realistic goals are replaced by delusional hope and earnest yearning.

Examples of how “inshallah” is used in conversation: 

If you are a parent, you can employ inshallah to either defer or subtly crush the desires of young children.

Boy: “Father, will we go to Toys ‘R’ Us later today?”

Father: “Yes. Inshallah.”

Translation: “There is no way we’re going to Toys ‘R’ Us. I’m exhausted. Play with the neighbor’s toys. Here, play with this staple remover. That’s fun, isn’t it?”

Ali summarizes, tongue-in-check, that “inshallah is used in Muslim-majority communities to escape introspection, hard work and strategic planning and instead outsource such responsibilities to an omnipotent being, who somehow, at some time, will intervene and fix our collective problems.”

In recent months, those problems have included numerous incidents of alleged discrimination against Arabic speakers and “Muslim-looking” peoples including Sikhs while flying or attempting to board airplanes. Earlier this year, three Muslims and a Sikh filed a lawsuit after being removed from a flight because the captain of the airplane did not feel comfortable with them as passengers. In November, two men were nearly prevented from boarding a Southwest flight because a few passengers heard them speaking Arabic and were afraid to fly with them.  While there are many more similiar incidents, perhaps there is a silver lining in this latest one, Ali writes: “Opportunity is often born from absurdities. I believe this latest episode is actually a great moment to bring the versatile and glorious term inshallah into the vocabulary of more Americans.”