The New Campus Raids

On February 26 the small town of Moscow, Idaho, saw more commotion than it had since a truck camper exploded in a vacant lot last September. While the town was still sleeping, two military planes landed at a nearby airport, and at 4:30 am, at least 100 armed federal agents raided a University of Idaho student apartment--all to arrest a single Saudi graduate student, Sami al-Hussayyen. As dawn broke, they interrogated at least twenty other Middle Eastern students and their spouses in their homes, sometimes in front of their children. Within hours, the Feds indicted al-Hussayyen on felony charges of visa fraud, accusing him of supporting a Detroit-based Muslim charity that, they alleged, had links to overseas terrorists. (The group has not been formally charged.)

Word of the raid spread quickly among foreign students across the country, as did news in December that six Middle Easterners studying in Colorado were jailed when they complied with the INS's "special registration" program, required of men from twenty-five predominantly Muslim countries. Their offense: dropping below the twelve-hour course minimum required for a student visa, even though they had permission from their schools. Another round of "enforcement action," to use agency parlance, had apparently begun.

Thanks to Hani Hanjour, the 9/11 hijacker who entered the United States on a student visa, South Asian and Middle Eastern students joined the government's suspect list soon after the attacks. Since then, says the ACLU's Lucas Guttentag, attorneys have observed "a persistent pattern of discriminatory investigations and enforcement against Muslims and South Asians, especially foreign students from Middle Eastern countries." An untold number disappeared in the mass INS sweeps immediately after 9/11. Then came the "special registration" arrests, which included many students. And round three has just begun: The Homeland Security Department's new immigration enforcement agency, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), introduced a massive database in January that will soon track the country's 1.2 million foreign students and visiting scholars in real time.

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