FAROUK ABDEL-MUHTI FREE AT LAST
PALESTINIAN IMMIGRANT ACTIVIST BACK IN NYC
Farouk Abdel-Muhti kissed the ground at New York's La Guardia Airport as he
ended 718 days in immigration detention on April 12--just hours after being
freed from an Atlanta penitentiary. Federal Judge Yvette Kane, in
Harrisburg, PA, issued an order on April 8 directing the government to
release the New York-based Palestinian immigrant activist within ten days,
calling him a "stateless man," and therefore not deportable.
Abdel-Muhti, born in Ramallah in the West Bank in 1947, had been jailed
since April 2002 on the basis of a 1995 deportation order. His legal team
had agrued he could not be legally deported back to Palestine in the
forseeable future. Judge Kane agreed, finding that Abdel-Muthi made
"substantial" efforts to obtain travel documents to leave the United
States, to no avail.
Abdel-Muhti was seized on April 26, 2002, at his home in Queens by the
Absconder Task Force, a joint federal-state immigration enforcement unit.
His arrest came a month after he began working regularly at New York's
non-commercial WBAI Radio, arranging interviews with Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories.
Abdel-Muhti has lived in the US without official immigration status for
over 30 years. Because he left the West Bank before the Israeli takeover in
1967, he cannot recieve travel documents from either Israel or the
Palestine Authority. Kane wrote that Abdel-Muhti "has sought travel
documents from Jordan, Israel, Palestinian authorities, Honduras and Egypt.
All efforts have been unsuccessful due to his unique position as a
Palestinian-born individual who is ineligible for either Israeli or
Palestinian identification numbers. Government efforts have likewise been
fruitless."
The Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis mandates the release
of immigration detainees who prove to be undeportable after six months.
Abdel-Muhti's detention ultimately lasted nearly 24 months--with over 250
days in solitary confinement. But the government refused to release him or
grant bond--first claiming it was on the verge of deporting him, then
arguing that the Zadvydas limits should not apply because he had obstructed
his own removal by intentionally confusing his identity.
The court rejected this claim, with Judge Kane calling the government's
repeated demands for more information about his identity "a Kafkaesque
exchange." She especially cited a last-minute government request that he
submit the same type of Israeli visa request that Israel had rejected in
his case some 30 years ago.
On April 5, just three days ahead of Kane's ruling, federal authorities
flew Abdel-Muhti from a county jail near Harrisburg to a federal
penitentiary in Atlanta, GA, hundreds of miles from his friends, family and
supporters in the New York area. Up to this point, he had been kept at
county facilities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the move to Atlanta
raised feras that he would be "disappeared" into the federal prison system.
Instead, he was placed on a flight back to New York. Activists, who had
held weekly vigils for his release at New York's Federal Building, hailed
this as a victory.
In a public statement to his supporters after his release, Abdel-Muhti
said: "I am grateful for the popular support you have given me in the
struggle for my freedom, which I have now gained. But there are still many
thousands of detainees and prisoners in jail who are suffering. We have won
a victory, but we still have to win the war for justice, equality, and
rights for both immigrants and for all the people in the nation who are
fighting for democratic rights and social justice."
(Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti)
See also WW3 REPORT #97
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Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, May 15, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution
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