In a letter notifying him that his final appeal to set aside the deportation order had been rejected, William Cleary, a Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, wrote: "It was determined that you were not engaged in any terrorist activity and were quickly cleared of any suspicion of terrorist activity." A few lines later, Cleary added a second time, "I am confident you did not engage in terrorist activity, you have never been charged as a terrorist or accused as being a terrorist."
There could hardly be more conclusive evidence that Mahmood's case had nothing to do with terrorism. Yet, years later, his name still appears on that Justice Department list of "Terrorism and Terrorism-Related Convictions." His two friends, also deported after being found guilty of visa violations and obtaining false IDs, are on the list, too, although there was absolutely no suggestion of any terror connection in their cases, either.
Nor are these isolated examples. Others on the conviction list who clearly were not terrorists include three Arab Americans, at least two of them naturalized U.S. citizens, convicted for buying a truckload of stolen breakfast cereal, and a group of 20 defendants, predominantly Iraqis, found guilty in a scheme to fraudulently obtain commercial driver's licenses and permits to transport hazardous material. There are also cases involving defendants convicted for false marriage claims, foreign students who illegally got jobs in violation of student visa rules, a young man from Saudi Arabia who stored child pornography on his computer, and various others where the record shows no mention of any terrorist link.
Even the most dangerous sounding of these, the one involving hazardous-material permits, may sound ominous, but the scam itself occurred in the 1990s, well before the 9/11 attacks, and prosecutors made it clear that there was no link with terrorism. So did the trial judge, who said he could not "characterize this as a successful prosecution of a terrorism case, because it was not."
None of the 20 defendants who illegally obtained those licenses received any prison time. All were given probation; some paid modest fines. Those sentences would certainly have been far harsher if there had been any genuine suspicion that the defendants might be dangerous. (The driver's license examiner they paid off at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, an American, remains on the "terror-related convictions" list, too.)
Why Are They on the List?
Given the clear evidence that they were never terrorists, why are Mahmood and his friends, as well as those Iraqi truckers and others in similar cases, still officially identified as having been "convicted of terrorism," as the Trump White House has inaccurately characterized everyone named on the Justice Department chart? Or, in the only marginally more careful wording used in the list itself, why are they still guilty of "international terrorism-related offenses"?
The immediate reason is that, like Mahmood, they originally came to the attention of investigators looking for possible terrorist ties. In other words, their cases started out as possible terrorism ones and, under Justice Department procedures, simply remained in that category even when no such ties were found. The broader reason: counting them and others like them that way plays right into the Trump administration's anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim agenda. It magnifies, falsely, the supposed threat of "foreign nationals" connected with "terrorism-related activity" in the United States.
Setting aside the cases that were clearly not in any way linked to terrorism, there are many more on the chart in which individuals were suspected of ties of some kind to terrorism but were never charged. In those cases, the question is simply left unanswered, but there can be no doubt that some of those suspects, too, were neither terrorists nor supporters of terror movements. In other words, that group similarly inflates the claimed total.
There is another strong hint that many on the Justice Department list are unlikely to have been either terrorists or to have had serious ties to such organizations and it requires no additional research. It's right there on the chart itself in a column listing the sentences that defendants received for their crimes. More than 130 of the offenders on the list (both foreign and U.S.-born), when convicted, were given probation but no prison time at all or were sentenced only to time served before trial. Another 45 were sentenced to one year or less, including several token sentences of one day or, in a single case, a week.
Those light sentences -- for more than a quarter of all the cases on the chart -- certainly seem to indicate that no authority thought the defendants represented a terror threat.
Another Distortion...
Counting cases that have nothing to do with terrorism as "terror-related" isn't the only way the administration has distorted the facts about immigration and the threat of terrorism. It also counts cases that have nothing to do with immigration.
For example, a White House fact sheet, summarizing the main findings of the January 16th Justice/Homeland Security report, says that 402 foreign-born defendants -- the total given in the report -- all "entered the United States through our immigration system."
That is false. The report doesn't say that at all. You have to look carefully to find it, but the document explicitly says the opposite, stating that along with those defendants who had at one time or another passed through immigration controls, the 402 foreign-born offenders also include individuals "who were transported to the United States for prosecution." Presumably, some of them were captured overseas by U.S. military or security agencies and some were turned over to the U.S. by a foreign government.
The Justice Department has not disclosed how many such individuals are on the list. The number, however, is apparently substantial. Researchers for the Lawfare Blog, working from an earlier version of the chart, determined that an even 100 defendants (later reduced to 99) "were extradited, or brought, to the United States for prosecution" without going through any immigration procedure. Including those cases as evidence of a lax immigration system is plainly deceptive.
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