DEARBORN, MI – A mother and her 7-month-old son were passing through security at Detroit Metropolitan Airport when they were pulled from line, detained and subjected to vigorous searches, including a chemical treatment of the boy, because one of their tickets included a special code used to alert security agents and airline personnel.
The code — SSS — tells them that the passenger has been listed on the government's Terroristic Screening Database, commonly known as "the watch list," which designates more than 1.5 million people, mostly Americans, as "suspected or known terrorists."
The woman's ticket had no such code. Her son's did. The United States government had designated this tiny boy, just beginning to crawl, a known or suspected terrorist.
A lawsuit over the list filed Tuesday against the U.S. government cites the Detroit incident as just one of many that illustrate how haphazardly Americans have been secretly but officially tied to terrorism unknown to them and with no reviewable proof.
Filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the suit claims that placement on the watch list is motivated more by religious profiling than security threats.
Inclusion goes far beyond added inconveniences during travel.
The lawsuit claims what respected studies have found true: names on the list have been disseminated to local and state law enforcement, foreign governments, corporations, banks, border agents and airlines, leading to harassment, job refusals, arbitrary closures of checking accounts and confinement in jail cells for hours at a time. One plaintiff, leaving Kuwait with renewed visa in hand, was abducted by government security agents, beaten and held for more than a year before his release, the lawsuit alleges.
CAIR fficials said people who have not been placed on the list are commonly detained because people with the same or similar names are and that the only "evidence" of terrorist ties to many on the list is "being Muslim."
“The terrorism watch lists are premised on the false notion that the government can somehow accurately predict whether an innocent American citizen will commit a crime in the future based on religious affiliation or First Amendment activities,” CAIR’s legal director, Lena F. Masri, said in a statement. “Our lawsuits challenge the wrongful designation of thousands upon thousands of American Muslims as known or suspected terrorists without due process.”
The suit seeks monetary relief for Baby Doe and the others.
The placement of Baby Doe, an Alameda County, CA, infant whose parents have Michigan ties, “highlights the recklessness the FBI engages in when designating people for the list,” Masri told Patch. “There’s a complete lack of due process.
“This baby was 7 months old, but was treated as a terrorist when he was crossing security,” Masri said. “How does that make our country safer?"
Though Baby Doe is the only infant named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, the story isn’t that unusual in the emotionally charged world in which American Muslims live, Masri said.
The allegations of 18 plaintiffs are “very representative of the consequences we see being faced by individuals placed on the list who are treated on less than equal terms than other Americans in this country,” she said, adding:
“I’ve heard of other babies and children, elderly and disabled people, and even dead people being placed on the watch lists. It makes you wonder if the government just goes through a list of names and adds them based on whether they sound Muslim.”
The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, whose agents are among the named defendants, approved nearly 90 percent of the names submitted by various agencies for the watch list from 2009-2013, the lawsuit alleges.
More than half of the 18 plaintiffs are from southeast Michigan, and several of them are from Dearborn, where about 40 percent of the city’s 100,000 residents are Arab Americans.
Masri said the FBI has used aggressive watch-listing tactics against residents of Dearborn, which has the second-highest concentration of Muslim Americans on the watch database.
Another of the plaintiffs, Yaseen Kadura, a U.S. citizen of Libyan descent who grew up in Michigan, said in a video statement that he encountered problems that extended beyond his inability to board planes at airports for the more than three years that he was on the watch list.
Kadura said he was re-entering the United States in 2012 after a brief trip to Canada when he was detained, held at gunpoint when handcuffed, and was interrogated for hours.
At one point, Kadura allages, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to convince him to become an informant. When he asked for an attorney, the agent allegedly said, “If you stick with our lawyer, it’s going to be difficult for you.”
Kadura, who apparently was added to the watch list in 2011 when he traveled to Libya and worked with journalists covering the civil unrest there, was able to get his name removed from the watch list last year, but still encounters problems when he tries to travel or use his Western Union account, which remains frozen, according to the lawsuit.
In January, for example, Kadura said he still couldn’t board a domestic flight without being subjected to hours of interrogation and time on the phone with government officials.
The consequences of being on the watch list manifest in different ways, Masri said. Some have had had multiple bank accounts simultaneously frozen, others have had their phones tapped, and others have had their citizenship applications placed on hold.
