U.S.-Deported Pakistanis: Outcasts in Two Lands

Anser Mehmood, formerly of Bayonne, with his wife and sons at home in Karachi.

At his home in Pakistan, the former detainee, Anser Mehmood, a 42-year-old truck driver and father of four who lived in Bayonne, N.J., described "that hell": a windowless solitary confinement cell where he spent four months last year at a federal detention center in Brooklyn.

There was no day and night, he said, only two overhead florescent lights switched on 24 hours a day. There was no outside world, only two closed-circuit cameras that relayed his every move to an unseen guard. There was also no interrogation that might explain why he was arrested after the Sept. 11 attacks and treated as a dangerous terrorist.

"In that time, no official from the F.B.I. and I.N.S. came to interview me," he said, referring to his four months in the cell. "They never came to ask me any questions."

Mr. Mehmood is one of six Pakistani men interviewed who were recently deported from the United States for entering the country illegally or overstaying visas. They say they now find themselves stranded between countries and cultures, their lives upended, since being detained and deported under a post-Sept. 11 crackdown. Back in Pakistan, which many had not seen for a decade or more, they are out of place. Many Pakistanis see them as victims of an anti-Muslim witch hunt. But others view them as traitors in a country where anti-Americanism is on the rise.

Justice Department officials say the immigration sweep is intended to thwart terrorist attacks and has produced valuable intelligence information in the campaign against terrorism. "In particular, we focus on criminals," said William Strassberger, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "This is a way to get leads or locate those who we are trying to find."

The accounts of these men also suggest that the dragnet — one of the largest in American history — has swept up the spouses of American citizens, homeowners and businessmen who had lived in America for seven years or more and were in the process of trying to legalize their immigration status. All said they did not have criminal records.

Government officials later told Mr. Mehmood's lawyer that F.B.I. agents who searched his home had found a license to carry hazardous materials, box cutters, a flight simulator program and three Pakistani passports in his name. But neither he nor any of the other men were charged with terror-related offenses.

Mr. Mehmood said he had explanations. His trucking company required him to have the hazardous materials license, he said. He used the box cutters on the job, he said. The flight simulator program was used by his children, and two of the passports were expired, and one was valid, he said.

Some 1,200 Arab and South Asian men, including Mr. Mehmood, were arrested in sweeps just after Sept. 11. Arguing that the release of information could alert terrorists, the Justice Department has declined to identify the men or describe how and why they were detained. Like Mr. Mehmood, many were held in solitary confinement for months. Ninety-nine were convicted of criminal charges, 281 were freed or are awaiting decisions on their immigration status, and nearly 500 have been deported. About 300 more men were arrested by local law enforcement agencies.

The other five Pakistani men interviewed are among the estimated 10 million people who overstayed their visas or entered the United States illegally. In the past, they might have lived quietly in the United States under the radar of immigration officials, who concentrated most of their efforts on securing borders and rarely pursued aliens once they entered the country. Since Sept. 11, they are being tracked and deported.

The five were among 1,100 people deported under a crackdown begun last spring focusing on 5,900 aliens who officials said had ignored deportation orders and were from countries where Al Qaeda is believed to be active. The government says about 300,000 people from other countries who have ignored deportation orders will be pursued later.

Five of the men interviewed here said that they were unaware of any outstanding deportation order against them and that they believed they had pending appeals or applications still winding their way through the Immigration and Naturalization Service's chronic backlog of cases, but were deported without seeing a judge. Some accused lawyers to whom they had paid thousands of dollars of not informing them of hearings or botching their cases.

All scoffed at the notion that their detention produced valuable intelligence. They described undergoing only cursory interviews by F.B.I. or I.N.S. agents: Do you like Osama bin Laden? Can you fly a plane? Do you pray five times a day?

Interviewed separately in Pakistan, they said they had been given little or no information about why they were picked up or where they were being taken. They were denied contact with families and lawyers for days or weeks at a time, they said.

Immigration officials said that they could not comment on specific cases and that all the people being deported had had an opportunity to see a judge and had either lost in court or failed to show up. "These are all people that have had their day in court," Mr. Strassberger said. "These are people who have already had their chance."

While whatever ordeal they faced after Sept. 11 in America is over, life in Pakistan has offered hardships all its own. American in attitude and manner, they are regarded by some Pakistanis as traitors. Four of them are separated from wives or children who remain in the United States.

Unlike the families of some of the others, Mr. Mehmood's family has come with him. He said his three older boys were failing classes taught in Urdu, which they do not speak. They are harassed and threatened.

"Over there, they call us terrorists," said his 12-year-old, Haris. "Over here, they say they are going to kill us."

When an interviewer, surprised by the thick vowels of Bayonne, told him he sounded as though he was from New Jersey, he tartly replied, "I am from New Jersey."

Mr. Mehmood, his family and the others interviewed complained bitterly that they had been unfairly marked for detention and deportation because they were Muslims. "Americans should apply the laws of the Constitution to everybody all over the world," he said, "not just Christians and Jews."

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which interviewed four of the men, said: "The individual cases are the tip of the iceberg. Essentially, the I.N.S. and F.B.I. targeted Pakistanis, Muslims, Arabs and others for greater scrutiny because of their national origin and religion."

Government officials deny this. They say that Muslims are not being singled out, but rather that certain people from certain places where terrorists are active.

By the account of Mr. Mehmood, on Oct. 3, 2001, he was resting in his home when his doorbell rang at 9 a.m. He said he had opened it to find 25 to 30 F.B.I. agents surrounding his home.

He said the agents had searched his home and asked him about his brother-in-law, whom they accused of credit card fraud and manufacturing false documents. The agents told him that he was clear with the F.B.I., he said, but that the I.N.S. wanted him for overstaying the business visa he entered the country under in 1994.

"You'll see a judge," Mr. Mehmood quoted the F.B.I. agent as saying. "You're a property owner, have a business and pay your taxes and that's all in your favor."

"He said that I'll be back home by 11 a.m. the next morning," he added.

Held overnight in a federal building in Manhattan, he did not see a judge the next day, he said. Instead, Border Patrol agents chained his hands and feet, he said, loaded him into a van with four other Muslim men and told him to not ask questions.

Arriving at the federal government's Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Mr. Mehmood said he had been pulled from the van and slammed against a wall so hard it bloodied his lip. He said a guard had told him, "You are here as a World Trade Center suspect."

Locked in a cell that night, he would remain there for four months and two days. For the next two weeks, he said, he was blocked from communicating with his family or his lawyer or seeing a judge. "Nothing," he said referring to those weeks. "Just those gray walls."

To fill the blankness, he turned to prayer. Over time, he became a devout Muslim.

Mr. Mehmood was not told at the time what F.B.I. agents had found at this home. The agents also later told him that they had been told that he refused to take a shipment to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11. Mr. Mehmood said the shipment was canceled minutes after the attack that day.

On Oct. 18, he saw an immigration judge who allowed him to call a lawyer, he said. When he called his family, the line was disconnected. After his arrest, television news crews swarmed his home, and schoolchildren had started calling his sons "terrorists." Stones hurled at his house at night had shattered three windows, his family said.

On Dec. 6, a judge considered a political asylum request Mr. Mehmood filed, citing the burning of his store by a political group in Karachi in 1989 and the shooting of his nephew in 1994. He said he had failed to file the request when he arrived in 1994 because a lawyer advised him to exaggerate the threat or wait. He said he did not want to lie in court and chose to wait.

The judge denied the request and ordered him deported. But Mr. Mehmood remained locked in solitary confinement for two more months while the F.B.I. and other federal agencies completed his security screening, he and his lawyer recounted.

"We have the presumption of innocence turned on its head," said Martin R. Stoller, Mr. Mehmood's lawyer. "Muslim males are presumed to be involved in terrorism and are held there until they are cleared."

On April 2, he was charged with a single criminal offense: using an invalid Social Security card. He pleaded guilty to removing the "not valid for employment" label from the card so he could get a job as a taxi driver, a common practice among immigrants. He was sentenced to time served.

Mr. Mehmood was transferred to the center's general population on Feb. 6. On April 19, I.N.S. agents escorted him to a passenger flight to Pakistan. He is barred from returning for a decade.