The Pursuit of Immigrants in America After Sept. 11

Terrorism, for America, may be a new threat, but according to a Justice Department report last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft has employed some old, discredited, means to fight it. The report, on the detention of 762 people on immigration charges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was issued by Glenn A. Fine, the department’s inspector general. It found that immigration laws were misused to establish a system to hold people, sometimes in exceptionally harsh settings, rather than charge them. The detentions were often supported by flimsy evidence and inconsistent criteria. Those detained were mostly Arab and Muslim men. Mr. Ashcroft has consistently defended what he has called “aggressive arrest and detention tactics in the war on terror” as needed to protect Americans. And the government didn’t approach the scale of the abuses in the last century, when large numbers of people were detained solely because of their politics or ancestry. In the Palmer raids of 1920, for instance, thousands of people, mostly immigrants, were rounded up in cities across America on suspicion of holding radical views. Many were beaten, held in intolerable conditions and forced to sign confessions. During World War II, about 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, many of them American citizens, were held in internment camps. Full Story