Justice Delayed

On October 29 the Bush Administration abandoned a two-decade effort to deport two Palestinian immigrants, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh. Longtime readers may recognize Hamide and Shehadeh as two of the "LA 8," a group of college-age students and activists arrested in pre-dawn raids in Los Angeles in January 1987 and placed in deportation proceedings for their alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), at the time the second-largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. I have been representing the LA 8 pro bono and writing about their struggle for The Nation ever since. This, I'm happy to say, will be my last piece about this case.

Hamide and Shehadeh's deportation case, which the Washington Post termed the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of immigration law, dates back so far that the initial charges were for communist affiliation. When it began, Ronald Reagan was President, the Berlin Wall was still standing and we were arming Osama bin Laden in his battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Shortly after the LA 8 were arrested, William Webster, then head of the FBI, admitted that the men had committed no crimes and that if they were US citizens there would be no basis for their arrest. But at the FBI's behest, immigration authorities charged them with distributing PFLP magazines, hosting annual community dinners that celebrated the PFLP and raising money for humanitarian aid organizations in Palestine.

In 1989 Federal Judge Stephen Wilson declared the initial charges unconstitutional, in a decision establishing that immigrants living here enjoy the same First Amendment rights as citizens. However, when Congress repealed the McCarran-Walter Act, upon which the initial charges had been based, immigration authorities simply charged Hamide and Shehadeh under a new provision making material support of terrorist organizations a deportable offense. This immigration law, enacted in 1990, was the precursor to the 1996 criminal material support statute that has been so widely used by the Bush Administration since 9/11.

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