LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The ACLU of Southern California sued the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service today for denying a 50-year-old Egyptian Muslim man’s naturalization application based on misleading FBI files and questionable tactics. This disturbing denial is part of what the ACLU/SC, the Council on American Islamic Relations and the National Immigration Law Center believe is a broader pattern of racial and religious profiling in the naturalization process aimed at blocking citizenship for individuals of Muslim countries and coercing them to become FBI informants.

In response, the civil rights groups separately filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today demanding the Department of Homeland Security provide a full record of all internal policies and practices relating to the treatment of naturalization applicants from Muslim countries.

“Tarek Hamdi is like dozens of other upstanding individuals from Muslim countries who meet all the requirements for citizenship but are turned away because of a constellation of discriminatory practices,” said Jennie Pasquarella, an ACLU/SC staff attorney, who is representing Mr. Hamdi. “We have seen case after case of the government using bogus denials, browbeating Muslim applicants into becoming snitches, and erecting needless hurdles for otherwise routine applications. National origin and religion must not be a factor in determining who can become a citizen of this country, yet it appears that too often it is.”

A father of four and practicing Muslim, Tarek Hamdi has lived in the United States for more than thirty years and became a lawful permanent resident more than two decades ago. Mr. Hamdi is an ideal candidate for naturalization, yet it took nine years before the USCIS made a decision on the merits of his application. USCIS declined Mr. Hamdi’s application alleging he failed to claim he was “associated” with the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), a group designated as a financier of terrorism by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2002. Yet, Mr. Hamdi has never been a BIF member and does not consider himself to be “associated” with BIF.

“I always played by the rules. I paid taxes, contributed to society and raised a beautiful family.
I have been treated differently because I am a Muslim man,” Mr. Hamdi said. “This has been incredibly frustrating and truly demoralizing. No person of faith, no honest man should have to face the discrimination I have, especially when striving to take an oath of allegiance to the United States.”

Mr. Hamdi did donate money to BIF in 2000 after learning about the organization’s humanitarian relief efforts, a legal act that does not disqualify him for citizenship. Upon questioning, he disclosed all this information to immigration officials. He explained that he donated to the charity, as he does to many Islamic and non-Islamic groups, as part of the Muslim charitable giving practice, zakat.

But in Mr. Hamdi’s case, USCIS used secret evidence, apparently obtained by an FBI file, to create a link between him and a designated terrorism financer when there was none. That practice of using FBI files to deny naturalization is well documented in a 2009 ACLU report, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity.” Though the specifics of Mr. Hamdi’s case may be unique, his story of applying for naturalization is the story of many other applicants of a similar religious and national origin background: needless delays, heightened scrutiny and ultimately erroneous denials.

“Post 9-11 government policies have persistently made it more difficult for Muslims to naturalize,” said Ameena Qazi, staff attorney and deputy executive director of CAIR of the Greater Los Angeles Area. “More troublesome is a wider pattern of singling out those from Muslim countries throughout the processing of their naturalization applications. They are asked inappropriate questions about their faith and subjected to unnecessary scrutiny.”

The civil rights groups who are filing the FOIA have received numerous reports of immigration officers making false denials and asking Muslim applicants during naturalization interviews detailed questions about their religious practices and the mosque they attend – questions irrelevant to their eligibility for citizenship.

“We are deeply concerned about USCIS practices that treat citizenship applicants from Muslim countries as presumed suspects,” said Karen Tumlin, managing attorney for the National Immigration Law Center. “There cannot be one immigration process for those of Muslim and Arab descent and another one for everyone else.”

Because the city of Santa Monica has stopped using vaguely worded camping ordinances as a pretext to round up homeless people, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP have agreed to drop a lawsuit against the city over its homeless policies, the legal team announced today. Among the provisions of the settlement are that no one should be forced out of his or her community simply for being homeless; that all communities need to provide a reasonable amount of shelter beds and serves; and public safety personnel must be adequately trained to interact with homeless people.

“As a result of Santa Monica’s de facto policy of criminalizing the mentally ill homeless, we filed suit -- similar to our successful lawsuits in Los Angeles, Laguna Beach and Santa Barbara -- in an attempt to get the city to direct its efforts to eliminate homelessness, not the homeless,” said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU/SC. “Almost immediately after our filing against Santa Monica, we documented that the practice of using the city’s vague anti-camping ordinance to harass the homeless had ceased, and that therefore the objective of the litigation had been met.

“We continue to monitor the city’s response, and are gratified that this primary tool of enforcement has, for all intents and purposes, ended. We are pleased to announce public settlement of the case, and commend the city of Santa Monica for its decision to no longer use its ordinance to criminalize poverty and mental illness,” Rosenbaum said.

The lawsuit, filed in July 2009, cited egregious examples of how Santa Monica used its police officers to harass and intimidate homeless residents. Among them was the case of a paranoid schizophrenic woman who reported seeing flying saucers. Santa Monica police arrested and jailed her multiple times for sleeping on the sidewalk when she had no home. Police also arrested a recovering addict for sleeping outside a shelter that didn’t have sufficient available beds that night. The man carried with him a bible, an Alcoholics Anonymous book and work clothes. He begged officers to release him so as to not endanger his job, but he was arrested and released two days later. He subsequently lost his employment.

“The city said on its own website that it gave chronically homeless people a stark, unconstitutional choice: get into treatment facilities or leave,” said Jonathan Altman, an attorney with Munger, Tolles. “We urge the city to focus its efforts away from criminalization and toward constructive supportive services aimed at eliminating homelessness, not the homeless.”

As part of the agreement, the ACLU/SC and Munger, Tolles released a joint statement with the city of Santa Monica, which outlines core principles that the ACLU/SC believes are fundamental to protecting the basic rights of the chronically homeless, many of whom suffer mental or physical disabilities and have been homeless repeatedly or for a sustained period of time.

A key portion of the settlement agreement reads as follows:

In agreeing that the lawsuit should end, the parties confirm their ongoing commitment to the following mutual principles in addressing homeless issues:

Joint Statement of Mutual Principles:

1. All communities need to provide a reasonable amount of shelter beds and services;
2. No one should be forced out of any community because he or she is homeless;
3. Merely sleeping and homeless status should not be crimes anywhere;
4. Communities need to engage in outreach to their most vulnerable; and,
5. Public safety personnel must be adequately trained.

The ACLU of Southern California’s Chief Counsel, Mark Rosenbaum, will testify before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on the unconstitutionality of Arizona’s AB 1070. The board is set to vote today on whether to support a boycott of Arizona in response to the new law requiring that police demand "papers" from people they stop and suspect are not authorized to be in the U.S.

The ACLU of Southern California does not take a stand on the boycott but supports every American’s right to take a principled position as a matter of conscience. The ACLU has voiced vehement opposition to the law and with a coalition of civil rights groups is challenging the extreme law, charging it invites racial profiling, violates the First Amendment and interferes with federal law.

The ACLU/SC has a long history of fighting such discriminatory laws and policies in Southern California. In Los Angeles, the ACLU/SC successfully fought off challenges to the LAPD’s Special Order 40, which prohibits police officers from using immigration status to initiate investigations. And it was Mr. Rosenbaum’s arguments before the U.S. District Court and his aid in negotiations with then Gov. Gray Davis that helped seal the demise of Proposition 187, a 1994 California voter-backed ballot measure that prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing education, health care and social services.

The following statement can be attributed to Mr. Rosenbaum:

“The linchpin of this policy and scheme is the requirement, now carved into Arizona state law, that job one of local police is to investigate and determine who may remain in the United States and to make unlawful immigration status and alien registration a matter of state criminal law. This is a system which trades on racial stereotypes, turning skin color, accent and ethnicity of neighborhood into presumptive indicia of criminal conduct under state law, rather than evidence of the rich and nourishing diversity of our American experiment we know them to be. It foments racial antagonisms this board has sought so successfully to remove from our community.”