Alameda County Infant On 'Terrorists' No-Fly Watch List: Lawsuit

By BETH DALBEY (Patch Staff)

At 7 months, about the time most babies are beginning to crawl, Baby Doe was being frisked by federal airport security agents who picked the infant’s name from among thousands of "suspected or known terrorists" on a federal no-fly watch list, a Michigan civil rights group alleged in a federal class action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Virginia.

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ lawsuit against the federal government, filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, alleges that placement on the watch list is motivated more by religious profiling than a security threat.

“The terrorism watch lists are premised on the false notion that the government can somehow accurately predict whether an innocent American citizen will commit a crime in the future based on religious affiliation or First Amendment activities,” CAIR’s legal director, Lena F. Masri, said in a statement. “Our lawsuits challenge the wrongful designation of thousands upon thousands of American Muslims as known or suspected terrorists without due process.”

Two lawsuits were filed, one seeking monetary relief for lead plaintiff Baby Doe and 17 members of of the class, and the other asking that plaintiffs' names be immediately removed from the watch lists and for a finding that the watch lists are discriminatory and unconstitutional.

Baby Doe, Alameda County

The placement of Baby Doe, an Alameda County, CA, infant whose parents have Michigan ties, “highlights the recklessness the FBI engages in when designating people for the list,” Masri told Patch. “There’s a complete lack of due process.

“This baby was 7 months old, but was treated as a terrorist when he was crossing security,” Masri said. “How does that make our country safer?

Though Baby Doe is the only infant named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, the story isn’t that unusual in the emotionally charged world in which American Muslims live, Masri said.

The allegations of 18 plaintiffs are “very representative of the consequences we see being faced by individuals placed on the list who are treated on less than equal terms than other Americans in this country,” she said, adding:

“I’ve heard of other babies and children, elderly and disabled people, and even dead people being placed on the watch lists. It makes you wonder if the government just goes through a list of names and adds them based on whether they sound Muslim.”

The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, whose agents are among the named defendants, approved nearly 90 percent of the names submitted for the watch list from 2009-2013, the lawsuit alleges.

More than half of the 18 plaintiffs are from southeast Michigan, and several of them are from Dearborn, where about 40 percent of the city’s 100,000 residents are Arab Americans.

Masri said the FBI has used aggressive watch-listing tactics against residents of Dearborn, which has the second-highest concentration of Muslim Americans on the watch database.

Another of the plaintiffs, Yaseen Kadura, a U.S. citizen of Libyan descent who grew up in Michigan, said in a video statement that he encountered problems that extended beyond his inability to board planes at airports for the more than three years that he was on the watch list.

Kadura said he was trying to cross the border in 2012 after a brief trip to Canada when he was detained, held at gunpoint when handcuffed and interrogated for hours.

At one point, Kadura allages, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to convince him to become an informant. When he asked for an attorney, the agent allegedly said, “If you stick with our lawyer, it’s going to be difficult for you.”

Kadura, who apparently was added to the watch list in 2011 when he traveled to Libya and worked with journalists covering the civil unrest there, was able to get his name removed from the watch list last year, but still encounters problems when he tries to travel or use his Western Union account, which remains frozen, according to the lawsuit.

In January, for example, Kadura said he still couldn’t board a domestic flight without being subjected to hours of interrogation and time on the phone with government officials.

The consequences of being on the watch list manifest in different ways, Masri said. Some have had had multiple bank accounts simultaneously frozen, others have had their phones tapped, and others have had their citizenship applications placed on hold.

FINAL Class Action Complaint

--Image via Shutterstock