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"I’m Not a Terrorist" DETAINEES FIGHT BACK BY
TRAM NGUYEN "Sometimes, they only give you two slices of bread. I’m hungry every day," says Ahman Raza, a Pakistani migrant worker who has been detained in Passaic County Jail in New Jersey for more than five months. "I’m not bad people. I’m not a terrorist. I’m not criminal," he says. The Department of Justice recently claimed that the total number of people still detained as a result of Sept. 11 is down to 327. But Monami Maulik, director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), disagrees. Based on DRUM’s personal contacts with detainees and their families, she estimates: "There are at least 1,000 still being held in just New Jersey." In Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, at least 50 detainees picked up since Sept. 11 are held under bright lights 24-hours a day, chained hand to foot when they leave their cells, and kept from direct sunlight for months at a time. There have been two suicide attempts reported so far. "Detention is prison," says Subhash Kateel, who organizes DRUM’s De-detention Campaign. "The whole sum of that experience is very violent. Every time I go in to visit, there’s at least one person who breaks down and cries." Before Sept. 11, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that about 150,000 people per year passed through its detention system. About 21,000 people remain in detention camp limbo. Since Sept. 11 new legal and political frameworks have given rise to what the Washington Post characterizes as a "deliberate strategy of disruption"—a race-based campaign that isn’t so much about investigating the 9/11 attacks as it is about locking up Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants profiled as terrorist threats. Caravans of federal trucks are cruising through Jackson Heights, Brooklyn, Coney Island, and Richmond Hill in New York City. Neighborhood residents say they hear about FBI raids all the time now. "Our biggest fear since 9/11 was that people were going to go into hiding more. But what’s happening now is so intense in the level of attacks, the level of targeting, that many people have no choice but to fight back," Maulik says. "Their backs are to the wall."
Efforts to build a long-term strategy against the detentions have started
to take shape among immigrant rights advocates, racial justice organizers,
civil liberties groups, and anti-war coalitions. "There
definitely was a period when our communities and organizations needed
to regroup and figure out what we can and can’t do," Maulik
says. "But now, our communities are waiting for us to take a public
stance, to be visible and vocal." |
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