Ideologija

U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border
Because of Ideology, ACLU Says

ACLU and NYCLU Release Government Records on "Ideological
Exclusion" Policy

NEW YORK -- July 12 -- The American Civil Liberties Union
and the New York Civil Liberties Union today released new
documents that indicate the government is broadly
interpreting and using a controversial Patriot Act power
known as the "ideological exclusion" provision to block
people from entering the country. The ACLU is concerned that
the provision is increasingly being used to target foreign
scholars and others whose politics the government disfavors.

"The American public suffers when our government abuses
anti-terrorism laws to shut out voices and ideas that it
doesn't want us to hear," said ACLU attorney Melissa
Goodman. "America has a rich tradition of robust academic
debate. The government dishonors that tradition when it
censors ideas at the border."

The ACLU and NYCLU obtained the documents through a Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in coordination with
PEN American Center and the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP). Although the documents are
heavily redacted, the records suggest that the government
used the ideological exclusion provision to exclude from the
country, among others, an Italian woman residing in
Colombia, a mother and daughter residing in Canada, a
businessman from Venezuela, and a woman from Costa Rica. The
names of the individuals have been redacted.

The ideological exclusion provision permits the government
to exclude anyone from the country who, in the government's
view, "endorses or espouses" terrorism or "persuades others"
to support terrorism. While the provision is nominally
directed at terrorism, the government appears to be using
the provision to censor and manipulate debate, said the ACLU.

Other documents released through the FOIA confirm that the
Departments of State and Homeland Security are interpreting
the law broadly. One document states that the law is
directed at those who voice "irresponsible expressions of
opinion." Another states, somewhat bizarrely, that an
individual can be excluded under the provision even if he or
she endorsed terrorism unintentionally.

"It is wholly inappropriate for immigration officials to
keep out people whose politics they don't like," said Donna
Lieberman, NYCLU Executive Director. "Barring the doors is
not the way a democracy deals with its critics."

Little is known about the specific incidents included in the
new documents, but the ACLU pointed to several recent cases
of high-profile individuals who have been excluded from the
United States for what appear to be ideologically motivated
reasons, including:

# In June, 75 South Korean activists were denied visas as
U.S. and South Korean officials met for free trade
negotiations in Washington, DC. The South Korean farmers and
trade unionists had hoped to voice their opposition to the
draft free trade agreement.

# In June, Professor Yoannis "John" Milios of the National
Technical University of Athens was blocked from presenting a
paper entitled "How Class Works" at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook. Though he visited the United States
as recently as 2003, upon arriving at JFK airport in New
York he was detained and interrogated about his politics.
After several hours, he was told that he would have to
return to Athens.

# In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that
she was denied a visa to come work with American music
producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the
Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government
officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly
sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian
Liberation Organization.

# In March, Iñaki Egaña, a Basque historian from Spain,
arrived at JFK airport with his two children with the
intention of researching Basque people in the United States.
Egaña and his family were detained while Egaña was
questioned about Mario Salegi, a Basque political activist
and writer whom Egaña had intended to study. After being
detained for 24 hours, Egaña and his family were sent back
to Spain.

# In Spring 2006, Dr. Waskar Ari, a scholar of race and
ethnic studies and a member of the Aymara indigenous people
in Bolivia, was blocked from assuming a teaching position at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Ari, who earned a
Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University, applied for a
work visa after accepting the Nebraska offer in June 2005.
More than a year later, U.S. immigration officials have yet
to act on his visa application, but have since revoked his
student visa, leaving Dr. Ari inadmissible to the country.
The State Department recently said that Dr. Ari is being
excluded on national security grounds, but it has not
offered any evidence to support this allegation.

# In 2005, Dora Maria Tellez, who served as a Parliamentary
leader and Minister of Health in Nicaragua in the 1980s, was
forced to abandon her teaching post at Harvard University
after the government rejected her visa application. Tellez,
who had visited the United States several times up to 2001,
was reportedly excluded because of her role in the 1979
Nicaraguan revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio
Somoza.

A lawsuit challenging the provision is currently pending in
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
That lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, NYCLU, AAUP, PEN and the
American Academy of Religion, and charges that the provision
is being used to prevent United States citizens and
residents from hearing speech that is protected by the First
Amendment. The groups filed the lawsuit after Professor
Tariq Ramadan was barred from entering the United States,
where he was offered a teaching position at the University
of Notre Dame. Although the government has since backed away
from its claim that Professor Ramadan is inadmissible under
the Patriot Act provision, on June 23, Judge Paul A. Crotty
ruled that the government must act on Ramadan's pending visa
application, and that it cannot bar non-citizens from the
United States simply because it disagrees with their
political views.

"Ideological misuse of the immigration laws has significant
effects on the freedom of academic and political debate
inside the United States," said Jameel Jaffer, Deputy
Director of the ACLU's National Security Program, who argued
before Judge Crotty. "As the court recognized, the
government cannot use the immigration laws as a means of
silencing its critics and denying Americans the opportunity
to hear dissenting voices."

The Patriot Act's ideological exclusion provision echoes
laws that were used in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to bar those
who were associated with the Communist Party. Those laws
were used to bar, among many other prominent individuals,
the writers Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dario Fo,
and Pablo Neruda, and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau.

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Goodman and Jaffer of the
ACLU; Arthur N. Eisenberg of the NYCLU; and New York
immigration lawyer Claudia Slovinsky.

The documents released today are online at:
http://www.aclu.org/exclusion

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