INS Arrests Foreign Visitors Who Followed Law

by Shadi Rahimi

My grandparents are Iranian citizens here in the United States on green cards. Neither of them speaks English. My grandpa is 86, and just recently recovered from hip replacement surgery. Grandma is 74, and has severe diabetes. I pictured them being dragged from my parent's house by rifle-toting secret agents and thrown into a jail cell.

In reality, the government is being much more sneaky about the process. On Monday in Southern California, more than 500 men and boys from Middle Eastern and African countries complied with orders to appear for what was advertised as a special Immigration and Naturalization Service registration program -- only to be arrested by INS agents, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Now the government says the numbers were "in the low 200s," even though INS officials speaking anonymously had agreed with the original figures. Most, apparently, have been released. But the chill remains.

There is a huge Iranian population in Southern California (there is even a portion of L.A. called "Little Tehran"). Monday's registration deadline applied to males 16 and older from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. The INS admitted many of those arrested had already applied to adjust their immigration status, but the requests had not yet been acted upon.

President Bush, in responding to questions about the Homeland Security regime, said new measures were required for the "protection of the American people." That's pure bull. This kind of thinking helped create the havoc in Southern California.

First of all, why would a non-citizen who was plotting to hijack a plane or blow up a building comply with INS orders? Lawbreakers are not law-abiding. Second, if these arrests were to prevent further events like Sept. 11, why have no Egyptians been included in the registration dragnet? Almost all the Sept. 11 hijackers were from either Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

I don't want men from Egypt to be racially profiled. I'm just pointing out holes in reasoning that the U.S. government doesn't even bother to fill. Fourteen of the 19 men the FBI claims were the Sept. 11 hijackers were from Florida, Governor Jeb Bush's state. Why the roundup in Southern California?

I admit it -- I'm a conspiracy theorist. But at the moment I have no clue about what the government could be plotting. All I can think of is that they want to get rid of as many of us as possible. The "war on drugs" and its cops and prisons strategically eliminates from society young men and women of color (mostly African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans), while the "war on terror" targets young Middle Eastern and Arab men.

Some compare this round of arrests and detainments to past policies such as internment camps or even the roundup of Jews in Germany more than half a century ago. But I worry that such comparisons suggest that these actions are simply another example of U.S. injustices -- later to be corrected -- that our children will learn about in history class while shaking their heads in disbelief.

What we really should be asking is: How has U.S. democracy regressed to a point in time when the American people have no say in any policy or action the government chooses to take?