Blind Sweeps Return

They say history repeats itself. But usually not quite so quickly. On December 19, the press reported that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had arrested hundreds of Muslim men in Los Angeles alone. The INS refused to say how many had been detained but, speaking anonymously, did not dispute lawyers' estimates of 500-700 detainees. One family described a 16-year-old boy being taken, in tears, from the arms of his pregnant mother. It was as if a September 2001 archive news loop had mistakenly made its way into today's news.

The next day, INS officials complained that the figures had been inflated, said the actual number was only in the "low 200s" and reported that most were being released. But whether in the 200s or the 500s, the latest wave of arrests of Muslim men suggests that John Ashcroft's Justice Department continues to prosecute the war on terrorism as if it's a war on Arabs and Muslims generally--by treating Arab and Muslim men as presumptively guilty, wasting precious resources targeting innocents and alienating the very communities he needs to work with if he is to have any chance of capturing Al Qaeda operatives.

The recent arrests in Los Angeles stem from the INS's "call-in" Special Registration program, the latest in a series of Justice Department ethnic profiling initiatives. It requires foreign nationals from twenty Arab and Muslim countries to report to INS offices to be fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated. Most of those arrested came from the largely conservative, decidedly nonterrorist population of Iranian immigrants who have settled in the Los Angeles area.

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