Treated like a criminal: how the INS stole three days of my life.

• Author: Arshadi, Behrooz

MY NAME IS BEHROOZ ARSHADI. I am forty-eight years old, and I work in marketing for a minority publication in Los Angeles. My wife and I came to this country in 1987. We were running from the situation in Iran, looking for a better life. We have a seven-year-old daughter, who was born in the United States.

We've been applying for a green card for years. We're at the end of the process, waiting for our interview. This fall, my lawyer told me the INS had ordered Iranian immigrants like me who were not U.S. citizens to report in. I decided to go on the last day, Monday, December 16.

I arrived at INS at about 10 A.M. There was a long line, and I had to wait and wait and wait. INS officers finally interviewed me about seven hours later for about twenty minutes. They asked me all the questions they already knew, basic questions that I had provided answers to long ago. They already had them in my file: "What is your mother's name? Your father's name? Where do they live?"

One agent asked me to wait. After about half an hour, an officer came and said, "You will have to be detained."

"Why?"

"Although you are married to an American citizen, you are out of status."

I was shocked. I'm not married to an American. Obviously, the guy didn't know what he was talking about. He didn't know anything about my case.

Though he didn't charge me with any crime, he handcuffed me and took me downstairs. They put me in what they called a "tank," and there were six such tanks. Inside, it was thirty-by-thirty, with eighty to ninety people inside. It was so crowded. The tank had two benches next to the wall and two open toilets. There wasn't space even to sit.

At one point, they took us out for fingerprinting and photos, and they made us put all our belongings in a bag--our ties, our watches, whatever we had. We kept only our clothes because they didn't provide any.

Other than that processing, they kept us in the tank until 5 A.M. They didn't talk to us. They didn't tell us what they were doing, why we were there, why they detained us. And they didn't give us blankets or warm clothing or anything. It was very cold. I was wearing my regular suit. This is Southern California, so it's a light suit. The air conditioning was going all the time. People were shivering. No one had a bed to sleep on. You couldn't even sit.

At about 5 A.M., they chained us all and took us by bus to the Pasadena jail about twenty minutes away. They put us in regular cells. We slept there, but only...