The Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco is calling the recent jailing of dozens of young Israelis in the United States an “absurd abuse of power” by government officials.
According to Mark Silverman, director of Immigration Policy at ILRC, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is “misusing recently enacted anti-terrorist legislation” by detaining the 50 or so Israelis reportedly jailed in Cleveland; Houston; San Diego; St. Louis; Kansas City, Mo.; and Wichita, Kan., since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“Measures like this are unfortunately not enhancing our security, but undermining some of the civil liberties that makes this such a great country,” he said. “Our government is inadvertently handing a victory to bin Laden and the terrorists.”
At least 11 of the jailed Israelis were ordered back to Israel by a Cleveland immigration judge Tuesday, who said government attorneys had presented no evidence of national security concerns.
Silverman is planning to contact Reps. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) and Nancy Pelosi (D-S.F.) to raise his group’s concerns regarding the remaining imprisoned Israelis.
Meanwhile, the revelation that so many Israelis, mostly men in their 20s, have been detained has some American Jewish leaders wondering if this is a new government attempt at evenhandedness.
No one refutes the likelihood that they violated visa regulations, but some have been in jail for more than a month for what normally would be considered petty infractions.
That leaves Jewish activists wondering if the U.S. Department of Justice is straining to show impartiality in its investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks to appease Arabs concerned that Washington is targeting only Arab and Muslim suspects.
Several Arab states are vital partners in the U.S.-led coalition to hunt down the Sept. 11 perpetrators.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials say they do not believe Israelis have been singled out and are treating the incarcerations as a consular issue rather than a political one.
“Israelis who break the law must understand there will be consequences for their actions,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington.”
Israeli officials say they sent advisories to their citizens in the United States after Sept. 11, warning them to have their papers in order.
Still, that wasn’t enough to reassure some American Jewish leaders, who note that visa violations typically do not result in jail time.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft refuses to disclose the names of detainees, but Israelis are believed to be the largest single national group arrested in a nationwide crackdown that has netted at least 554 on visa violations — and 55 charged with a direct link to the attacks — since Sept. 11.
The Zionist Organization of America this week said it was crafting a letter to the Justice Department complaining that the large-scale arrests of Israelis “play into the hands of anti-Semites” because of the canard that Israel orchestrated the suicide attacks and that 4,000 Jews were warned not to come to their jobs at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
“There is no evidence, historically or presently, that anyone from Israel has ever been involved with terrorism against America,” ZOA President Morton Klein said.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, urged caution in reacting to the arrests.
“In situations like that, you have to be careful about the allegations you make. We and others are still looking into it, trying to ascertain the facts,” Hoenlein said.
One of the situations involved five Israeli men shooting photographs against a backdrop of the burning World Trade Center.
The men worked for a moving company and happened to have box cutters — one of the weapons used on the hijacked flights — in their truck.
The men were imprisoned in Brooklyn, where one reportedly failed a polygraph test when discussing his Israeli army service.
The men were never charged with a crime, but complained that they were treated like criminals and even intentionally placed with Arab inmates, who beat them up. After two months in jail, the five were quietly deported to Israel last week.
The Anti-Defamation League took the incident seriously, but not the suggestion that Israelis are being unfairly singled out.
“There’s a war, a change of scenery, and the fact that Semitic-looking people are caught in the web of ethnic profiling is an unfortunate consequence of the new reality,” the national director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, said.