A Rebuke to Ashcroft

"We have to hold these people until we find out what is going on." According to a report issued June 2 by the Justice Department's own Inspector General, that's what Michael Chertoff, head of the department's criminal division, told his deputy in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. He was referring to hundreds of immigrants swept up and labeled "of interest" to the 9/11 investigation. The report finds that in order to "hold these people," high-level Justice Department officials exploited immigration law for purposes it was never designed for--denying immigrants bond without evidence that they were dangerous, holding them incommunicado under unduly harsh conditions and keeping them locked up for months, even after they had agreed to leave the country.

The immigrants, nearly all Arab or Muslim, were picked up on flimsy or no evidence and held as long as the FBI could not rule out that they might somehow be connected to the attacks. The government charged them with routine immigration violations and adopted a blanket, and blatantly illegal, policy of denying bond even when it had no reason to believe that a detainee posed a danger or flight risk. The Immigration and Naturalization Service adopted an official practice of seeking continuances and extensions to obscure the fact that it had no evidence and to keep immigrants detained without hearings.

The only legitimate purpose for immigration detention is to remove a person from the country. But the Inspector General reports that long after the cases were resolved and immigrants had agreed to leave, they were kept behind bars, solely because the FBI had not yet cleared them of connection to terrorism, a process that took an average of eighty days and as long as 244 days.

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