A girl in exile: after the FBI pegged her as a potential suicide bomber, the 16-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants living in New York was forced to leave the United States.

• Author: Bernstein, Nina
• Position: NATIONAL

On May 12, Tashnuba Hayder found herself back in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the birthplace she'd left more than a decade ago. Slumped on a bed she would share with four relatives that night, the 16-year-old girl from Queens, N.Y., looked stunned.

On the dusty road from the airport, she had watched rickshaws surge past women sweeping the streets, bone-thin in their bright saris. Now, in a language she barely understood, relatives lamented her fate: to be forced to leave the United States, her home since kindergarten, because the FBI had identified her as a potential suicide bomber.

"I fed like I'm on a different planet," said Tashnuba.

SUSPICIOUS CHAT ROOM

The story of how the daughter of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh living in a neighborhood of tidy lawns and American flags was labeled an imminent threat to national security is still shrouded in government secrecy. This account, therefore, is in large part Tashnuba's, since federal officials will not discuss the matter.

But as the first terror investigation in the U.S. known to involve minors, Tashnuba's case reveals how deeply concerned the government is that a teenager living in America might become a terrorist. And it has stoked the debate over balancing government vigilance and the protection of individual freedoms in the post-9/11 world.

It is not known what prompted authorities to investigate Tashnuba, who says the accusations against her are false. She says that the government apparently discovered her visits to an Internet chat room where she took notes on sermons by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a London-based Islamic cleric long accused of encouraging suicide bombers.

ALARM BELLS

As suicide bombings mount overseas--and with teenage girls among the perpetrators--there is no doubt that the government's intelligence efforts are spurred by legitimate fears. But Tashnuba says she opposes suicide bombing and that the government treated her like a criminal simply for exercising her freedoms of speech and religion. She believes she was singled out because she is not a U.S. citizen, which allowed investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing juvenile and criminal proceedings. "That gave them the green light to get me out of my family," says Tashnuba.

The USA Patriot Act, enacted by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provides for heightened domestic security against terrorism; it also facilitates surveillance procedures. A former FBI agent, presented...