National Security Entry Exit Registration System -Nseers-

• Author: Kareem Shora
• Position: Director of Legal Policy with the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee -ADC-
• Pages: 73-80

Kareem Shora - Kareem W. Shora, JD, LLM is Director of Legal Policy with the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC). He has been with ADC as Legal Advisor since 2000 before being named Director of Legal Policy in 2004. Founded in 1980, ADC is the largest membership organization in the United States dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Arab Americans. Shora, who was born in Damascus, Syria, earned his JD from the West Virginia University College of Law and the LL.M. specialty in International Legal Studies from the American University Washington College of Law. He has served as a legal associate with the WV Office of the Attorney General, the WVU Immigration Law Clinical Program, and the Columbia Energy Corporate Law Department.

Page 73

When Mr. and Mrs. Walid Mughrabi approached the Texas border after a weekend shopping trip in Mexico, they did not expect criminal treatment. As a practicing attorney in San Antonio and then in Houston, Mr. Mughrabi had crossed the United States-Mexico border over fifty times without incident. This time was different. When the couple showed their documents, they were asked to submit to fingerprinting, photographing, and questioning as targeted foreign nationals. When they refused, Mr. Mughrabi, a Kuwaiti-born United States citizen, and his wife, a Lebanese citizen with permanent residency status and a pending United States citizenship application, were told that they would not be allowed to cross the border unless they agreed to be "registered" by fingerprinting and photographing.

Although the Mughrabi experience carries troubling implications for United States citizens, their experience was mild compared to those of well over a thousand non-citizen males (1,745 individuals as of March 4, 2003) detained as a result of the immigration authorities' continuing "call-in registration" program established in November 2002.¹ In addition to imprisonment, detainees face immediate deportation if their visa status is found to be "out of status," even though many detainees have been rendered "out of status" due to processing delays beyond Page 74 their control.² Several such detainees have reportedly been detained for periods of over a week, strip-searched on several occasions, handcuffed to chairs while awaiting interrogation, kept without food for over twenty hours, and kept in prison cells characterized by extreme temperature variation without proper bedding. Although the Attorney General's office has indicated that only one person has been deported as a result of the call-in registration program (as of March 4, 2003), this information is highly questionable; according to immigration authorities there have been 4,825 Notices To Appear (NTAs) issued as a result of the registration process, 101 individuals taken into custody, and fortysix individuals charged with crimes as of March 4, 2003.³

In March 2003, the Attorney General's office indicated that eleven individuals with alleged terrorist ties have been captured as a result of the "call-in registration" program; however, the Office failed to distinguish whether those individuals were detained at a port of entry or domestically. The Attorney General's office has also failed to disclose any additional information concerning those individuals and indicated that all were deported after being detained-causing many to question the wisdom behind deporting suspected terrorists without prosecution.

The "call-in registration" is only one of several initiatives implemented by the Attorney General's office which patently targets Muslims and Arabs in America. Claiming authority under a rarely used "alien registration" provision of the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA)⁴ and the 2002 Enhanced Border Security Act (EBSA)⁵, this "call-in registration" program is part of the Attorney General's designated "National Security Entry Exit Registration System" (NSEERS)⁶. Seam-lessly blending the nationally targeted provisions of NSEERS into the general provisions of EBSA and the INA, the Attorney General's initia-Page 75tives go far beyond what Congress authorized. INA allows for special registration of individuals considered to be national security threats, originally intended for Communist sympathizers during the Cold War, but does not mention the special domestic "call-in" phase of NSEERS. Meanwhile, EBSA mandated universal biometric identification measures, tamper-proof documentation, and a unified entry-exit tracking system for all foreign nationals to be implemented by 2005. These requirements have recently begun to be implemented as of January 4, 2004, under the newly announced US-VISIT⁷ program. US-VISIT requires all foreign visitors with a visa to the United States to be photographed and fingerprinted at international ports of entry...