ADC/LA/OC Condemns Latest Attempts By The Department Of Homeland Security To Invoke The USA Patriot Act To Deport Palestinian American Activists In Los Angeles
Contact Ban Al-Wardi, Esq
In papers filed last week, the DHS announced that it will seek to deport Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide under provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act that were declared unconstitutional by a federal district court in 1989, and repealed by Congress in 1990. The DHS is also seeking to add new charges under the USA PATRIOT Act, marking the first time the government has enforced a PATRIOT Act provision making foreign nationals deportable for their support of "terrorist groups," broadly defined as any two or more persons who has threatened to use or used a weapon to endanger person or property. These charges are likely to be dismissed, because the government cannot find factual grounds to substantiate the charges and missed a court-imposed deadline for filing any such additional charges more than two months ago.
Hamide and Shehadeh, both Green Card holders, have built their lives with their families in the United States for the last three decades. Mr. Shehadeh previously served as the ADC West Coast Regional Director for 8 years through 2002 and currently serves as a local Chapter Board member with ADC LA/OC chapter. The government charges that Hamide and Shehadeh were associated with and supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a faction of the PLO, in the mid-1980s.
However, when they were arrested (with six other student activists in Los Angeles) in 1987, the then-FBI Director William Webster testified in Congress that after an extensive three-year FBI investigation, the respondents "have not been found to have engaged themselves in terrorist activity," and admitted that "if these individuals had been United States citizens, there would not have been a basis for their arrest."
Senator Kennedy, Congressman Conyers have expressed strong opposition to the decision of the DHS to pursue the deportation case and have asked that DHS Secretary Tom Ridge to drop the case. and Shehadeh and Hamide are defended by David Cole, a volunteer attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Marc Van Der Hout, for the National Lawyers Guild, and acclaimed civil rights attorney, Leonard Weinglass. END.
ADC LA/OC (310) 552-2888, Email: adclaoc@hotmail.com
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