Report assails roundup of immigrants after 9/11
Harsh treatment of prisoners is outlined
By Eric Lichtblau/NYT (NYT) The International Herald Tribune Tuesday, June 3, 2003
WASHINGTON: The Justice Department's roundup of hundreds of illegal immigrants after the Sept. 11 attacks was plagued with "significant problems" that forced many people with no connection to terrorism to languish in prison in harsh conditions, according to an internal report released Monday.

The long-awaited report from the Justice Department's inspector-general concluded that officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly in New York City, "made little attempt to distinguish" between illegal residents who had possible ties to terrorism and those swept up "coincidentally" in the investigation.

The report represented a high-level validation of the concerns voiced by civil rights groups about the broad net that the authorities have cast in prosecuting the campaign against terrorism, but Justice Department officials said they believed they had acted within the confines of the law.

"We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," said Barbara Comstock, a Justice Department spokeswoman.

More than 760 illegal immigrants were imprisoned in the weeks and months after the attacks, as authorities traced thousands of leads and sought to prevent a follow-up attack. Most of those people have been deported, and none have been charged as terrorists.

The Justice Department has fought to maintain the secrecy of the round-up operation, and the report by the inspector general offers the most detailed portrait to date of who was imprisoned, the delays many faced in being charged or getting a lawyer, and the abuse that some prisoners faced.

The report showed, for instance, that some 75 percent of the illegal immigrants were from New York or New Jersey, many were Pakistanis, and most were arrested within three months of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report found that immigrants arrested in New York City and housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn faced "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" from some guards and "unduly harsh" detention policies. Eight-four inmates there held in terrorism investigations were subjected to 23-hour "lockdown," the report found.

Immigration officials sometimes did not notify prisoners of the formal charges against them for more than a month, a break from their stated goal of 72 hours, the report said. The delays hindered the prisoners' ability to understand why they were being held, get lawyers and request a bond hearing.

In addition, investigators found that the FBI moved slowly to determine whether a suspect was in fact linked to terrorism. While very few suspects have been linked to terrorist suspicions, it took the FBI an average of 80 days to clear prisoners for removal.

Civil rights groups said they hoped the report would pressure the Justice Department to change its procedures.

"Immigrants weren't the enemy," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But the war on terror quickly became a war on immigrants. The inspector general's findings confirm our long-held view that civil liberties and the rights of immigrants were trampled in the aftermath of 9/11." The New York Times

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