ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
15, Illegal, and Muslim, What Now??
Ask Me No Questions
Unit Developed by April Tondelli
Table of Contents
1) Introduction …………………………………………………………….2
2) Unit Plans ……………………………………………………………….5
3) Teacher Read Aloud……………………………………………….11
4) Mini - Lessons………………………………………………………….14
5) Team Work/Guided Reading Questions……………47
6) Writing/Research …………………….…………………………..61
7) Supplementary Activities……………………………………105
8) News Articles ………………………………………………………112
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Summary: Ask Me No Questions by Marina Budhos, is the first person narrative of a 14
year old girl whose family immigrated to the United States when she was very young so
that she and her sister could have access to a better education. Although the family over
stayed their original tourist visa many years ago, they never had any problems until after
the September 11th terrorist attacks. After the attacks, all men from 24 Muslim
countries are required to register with the government. Her dad decides to seek asylum
in Canada instead of registering, because he is afraid the entire family will be sent back
to Bangladesh. When they arrive at the Canadian border, they are turned around, and he
is arrested by the US government. Their mother decides to stay near the detention
facility, and Nadira and her 17 year old sister Aisha are sent back to Queens, New York,
to stay with relatives and continue school. For the duration of the book, their lives are in
a constant state of upheaval. Aisha does not know if she will be able to attend college,
even though she is a straight A student, other family members are arrested, and the girls
have no idea if they will all be deported to Bangladesh. At the same time, they are not
allowed to tell anyone, including friends, teachers or school counselors what is happening
to them, for fear of dishonoring the family.
Background: Although this story is fictional, a number of events were pulled directly
from news headlines and the experiences of immigrants from historically Muslim
countries. The United States did, in fact, have a program which required all men from
dozens of Muslim countries to register. Thousands of these men were deported when
they registered solely for visa issues, and were never charged with any other crimes. The
program never resulted in a single charge of terrorism, and was abandoned after bad
publicity about how the men were being treated. The book discusses the true life aspects
of the story in an after forward, and there were a series of articles in the Chicago
Tribune detailing cases that have a great deal in common with Nadira’s families.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
April Tondelli - Teacher Notes:
Background on unit: I have been teaching in the Chicago Achievement Academies (AA)
for 5 years, and teaching in Chicago Public Schools for eight years. During my second year
in the AA, I began pursuing a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, because I
thought there was room for innovation and improvement when it came to tailoring C & I to
the needs of our specific population. This is the sixth unit I have developed from scratch
and taught in my classroom. I chose this text for several reasons:
* I have heard a number of students make racist or at best, uninformed comments
about Muslims and “A - rabs”. Because there are no people of Asian or Middle Eastern
descent living in their neighborhoods, or attending their school, misinformation and
stereotypes have been allowed to run wild. I have had several students report to me with
pride, that they have physically forced men whom they believe to be Arab or Muslim off
the bus, for “being terrorists“, or “killing Americans“. While I attempted to redirect
these students when these incidents were reported to me, I knew that there
reprehensible behavior was emblematic of lack of knowledge, or to put it plainly,
ignorance. I wanted to address this ignorance in a constructive format which did not
involve lecturing, or a series of horrified and chagrined looks.
* I also choose this text because I think it addresses many broader issues and
themes in an engaging way such as illegal immigration in general, racism, coming of age,
trying to fit in etc… I think these commonalities, along with the fast - paced, first hand
narration style, and will draw in all of our readers.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
REFLECTION AFTER TEACHING: Spring of 2010 was the first year that I taught Ask
Me No Questions. Although I had spent 50+ hours creating this unit, and attempting to
tailor it to the needs of my students, I still noticed dozens of parts that I wished to
enhance or update as the unit progressed. I also had the good fortune to be working with
a student teacher, Natalie Angela, during this time period, and we discussed how we could
more effectively meet the needs of our students on a daily basis. Some ideas never quite
got off the ground (like having students from a private Islamic school in the suburbs
come speak to our school), but we did create many other components to the unit that
proved to be invaluable.
Items created during the unit:

DREAM Act – Mini Research Essay

Guided Questions for La Ciudad, Muslims in America, and The New
Americans

Immigration Glossary/Timeline

Immigration Interview
The next time I teach this unit, there are several things that I would like to do
differently. I have considered creating a power point about the history of Bangladesh to
substitute for students reading chapter 4. Although this chapter has a certain lyrical
beauty, my students really did not have the background knowledge needed to comprehend
it, and began to feel that the rest of the novel was equally inaccessible or that dreaded
word “boring”. I would also make greater attempts to bring in a young person who is
Muslim American, and could speak about that experience. Because my students do not go
to school with any Muslims, it is very hard for them to break out of the “terrorist” or
“A – rab” mentality. I also think it would be valuable for the student to meet a panel of
immigrants from different (non-Hispanic) countries, so that they could make connections
to immigration as a global phenomenon.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
UNIT
PLANS
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions - Week 1
Monday - Day 1
Complete &
Anticipation
Guide, discuss
topic of unit,
and any cultural
sensitivity
issues
ML - Complete
K & W of KWL
about
immigration/
illegal
immigrants.
Tuesday Day 2
RA - AMNQ
Chap. 1. pg 1
- 10. Discuss
& complete
questions as
a class.
ML Complete
vocabulary in
context I.
TW - Discuss
“know” and
“want to know”
TW Discuss and
complete
vocabulary
mind maps.
IP- Intro
choices for
weekly writing
topic (prereading)
IP - Writing
Topics cont…
(ALL PLANS ARE BASED ON 90 MINUTE PERIODS)
Wednesday Day 3
RA - AMNQ
Chapter 2.
Pages 11- 18.
Discuss and
complete
questions as a
class.
ML - Give
examples of
meaningful
sentences &
have students
create synonyms
and antonyms
for each
vocabulary word.
TW - Students
read ANMQ
chapter 3 & 4,
pages 19 - 28
Thursday - Day 4
Friday - Day 5
RA - Article 1 discuss with
students as they
complete written
reflection.
RA - Article 2 discuss with
students as they
complete written
reflection.
ML - Introduce
“Significant
Quotes” and
Bengali phrase
charts, and work
with class to pick
an example of
each.
Quiz over
vocabulary &
AMNQ chapters
1-5
TW - Students
read ANMQ
chapter 5, pages
29 - 41
Students use
internet to
interpret Bengali
phrases &
vocabulary
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 3 & 4
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 5
OR - View
portion of movie
related to
immigrant
experience
w/questions
HW Immigration
acrostic
Review
Vocabulary for
quiz
Vocabulary: Vocabulary: mimics, charred, blurting, sheepish, quarreled





AMNQ = Ask Me No Questions
RA = Teacher Read Aloud
ML = Mini-Lesson
TW= Team Work
IP= Independent Practice
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions - Week 2
Monday - Day
Tuesday - Day 7
6
RA - Article 3
RA - Article 4 - discuss with
discuss with
students as
students as they
they complete
complete written
written
reflection.
reflection.
ML - Complete
vocabulary in
context II.
TW - Discuss
and complete
vocabulary
mind maps.
IP- Intro
choices for
weekly writing
topic (During
Reading # 1 8)
Wednesday Day 8
RA - Article 5 discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
Thursday Day 9
RA - Article 6
- discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
ML - Give
examples of
meaningful
sentences & have
students create
synonyms and
antonyms for
each vocabulary
word.
TW - Students
read ANMQ
chapter 6, p. 42 54
ML - Discuss &
Assign themes
that students
will be tracking
across novel,
work with class
to pick an
example of
each.
TW - Students
read ANMQ
chapter 7 p 55 58, and answer
questions
ML Vocabulary
review +
review of how
to create
meaningful
sentences
work sheet.
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 6
IP - Students
look for
evidence related
to their theme
in chapters 1 - 7
IP - Writing
Topics cont…
TW Students read
ANMQ chap 8,
pages 59 - 67,
and answer
questions
Friday - Day
10
RA - Article
7 - discuss
with students
as they
complete
written
reflection.
Quiz over
vocabulary &
AMNQ
chapters 6 8
Assign
research
topics, review
appropriate
internet
sources &
using
citations, and
begin
research
OR - View
portion of
movie related
to immigrant
experience
w/guiding
questions
HW - Review
for quiz
Vocabulary: lavishes, valedictorian, scowls, hooligans, bewildered
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions - Week 3
Monday - Day
11
RA - Article 8
- discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
Tuesday - Day
12
RA - Article 9 discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
ML - Complete
vocabulary in
context 3.
ML - Give
examples of
meaningful
sentences &
have students
create synonyms
and antonyms
for each
vocabulary word.
TW - Students
read AMNQ
chapter 9, p. 68
- 79
TW - Discuss
and complete
vocabulary
mind maps.
IP- Intro
choices for
weekly writing
topic (During
Reading # 9 14)
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 9
Wed. - Day 13
RA - Article
10- discuss
with students
as they
complete
written
reflection.
ML Characterizati
on -Discuss
character
traits and
characters in
AMNQ - Begin
character
chart
TW Students read
AMNQ
chapter 10 p
80 - 87, and
answer
questions
IP - Students
look for
evidence
related to
their theme in
chapters 8 10
Thursday - Day
14
RA - Article 11discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
Friday - Day 15
ML - Vocabulary
review + ART!
Have students
illustrate a
meaningful
sentence for
each of the 15
vocabulary
words
TW - Students
read AMNQ
chapter 11, pg
88 - 103, and
answer
questions
Quiz over
vocabulary &
AMNQ chapters
9 - 11
IP - Writing
Topics cont…
OR - View
portion of movie
related to
immigrant
experience
w/guiding
questions
RA - Article 12discuss with
students as they
complete written
reflection.
Continue
research, discuss
creation of
power points,
bullet points
etc…
HW - Review
for quiz
Vocabulary: skeptical, flagging, harangue, jurisdiction, ravenous
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions - Week 4
Monday - Day 16
RA - Article 13discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
ML - Complete
vocabulary in
context 4.
TW - Discuss
and complete
vocabulary mind
maps.
IP- Intro
choices for
weekly writing
topic (During
Reading # 1517)
Tuesday - Day
17
RA - Article 14discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
Wed. - Day 18
ML - Give
examples of
meaningful
sentences &
have students
create synonyms
and antonyms
for each
vocabulary word.
TW - Students
read AMNQ
chapter 12,
pages 104 - 113
ML Characterizatio
n -Discuss
character traits
and characters
in AMNQ Begin character
chart
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 12
IP - Students
look for
evidence related
to their theme
in chapter 11- 14
RA - Article 15discuss with
students as
they complete
written
reflection.
TW - Students
read AMNQ
chapters 13-14,
p 114 - 123, &
answer
questions
Thursday Day 19
RA - Article
16- discuss
with students
as they
complete
written
reflection.
ML Vocabulary
review +
review of how
to create
meaningful
sentences
work sheet.
Friday - Day
20
RA - Article
17- discuss
with students
as they
complete
written
reflection.
Quiz over
vocabulary &
AMNQ
chapters 12 15
TW Students
read AMNQ
chapter 15,
pg 124 - 136,
and answer
questions
IP - Writing
Topics cont…
Continue
research,
discuss
creation of
power points,
bullet points
etc…
OR - View
portion of
movie related
to immigrant
experience
w/guiding
questions
HW - Review
for quiz
Vocabulary: exasperated, brazen, jeopardizing, giddy, amnesty
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions - Week 5
Monday - Day
16
RA - AMNQ
Chapter 16, pgs
137 - 148.
Discuss &
complete
questions as a
class.
ML - Complete
vocabulary in
context 4.
Tuesday - Day 17
Wed. - Day
18
RA Vocabulary
review
word
search
puzzle.
Thursday Day 19
FINISH
RESEARCH
POWER
POINTS/
POSTERS
Friday - Day 20
ML - Give examples
of meaningful
sentences & have
students create
synonyms and
antonyms for each
vocabulary word.
ML Character
&
Vocabulary
Review
jeopardy
for final.
PRACTICE
PRESENTAT
IONS, AND
FINISH
RESEARCH.
TW - Discuss
and complete
vocabulary
mind maps.
TW - Students
read AMNQ
chapter 18, pages
153 - 159
FINAL
CONTINUE
…
CONTINUED…
(Students should
keep track of
what they’ve
learned in chart
to be turned in
with their printed
power point slides
or poster.)
Continued…
IP- Intro
choices for
weekly writing
topic (During
Reading # 18 23)
IP - Answer
questions for
chapter 18 and
complete reflection
FINAL
RA - AMNQ
Chapter 17, pgs 149
- 152. Discuss &
complete questions
as a class.
PRESENT
RESEARCH TO
CLASS IN
SMALL GROUPS
Vocabulary: countenance, discrepancy, disheveled, brooding, wavers
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
TEACHER
READ ALOUD
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Background on Immigration Articles for Reading Alouds:
I searched through hundreds of articles, mostly from the Chicago Tribune, and the
Tribune companies in general, for articles related to post September 11th treatment of
Muslims, illegal immigration, and especially how immigration policy is affecting families. I
tried to pick a wide variety of articles that may give further details and background on
issues raised in the story. Of course, the goal is for the students to make connections
between Nadira’s family, and thousands of other families facing immigration issues across
the United States. I included more articles then would be needed, so that the teacher
could pick and choose what would be the best for their students. Any teacher could also
type in keywords such as “Muslims”, “immigration” or “illegal immigration” into their local
newspaper’s search engine to locate articles specific to their community. I designed the
Reading Showcase student response page to work with any article related to topics raised
in Ask Me No Questions.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Read Alouds - Immigration Articles
Date: ________ Headline: _______________________________________________________
1) What did you learn about immigration from this article? ______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
2) How did this article relate to “Ask Me No Questions”? _______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Date: ________ Headline: _______________________________________________________
1) What did you learn about immigration from this article? ______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
2) How did this article relate to “Ask Me No Questions”? _______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Date: ________ Headline: _______________________________________________________
1) What did you learn about immigration from this article? ______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
2) How did this article relate to “Ask Me No Questions”? _______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
***(NEWS ARTICLES ARE AT THE END OF UNIT)**
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
MINILESSONS
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
IMMIGRATION
KWL
What do you KNOW, and what do you WANT TO KNOW, about immigration? Why do immigrants
come here? Why do some come legally and some illegally? How are they treated by Americans?
What movies have you seen?
KNOW
WANT TO KNOW
LEARNED
Reflection: What do IMMIGRANTS have in common with other Americans?
________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Ask Me No Questions Pre – Reading Activity
Directions: When you hear/see the word “immigration”, what does it make you think of?
Write a word that includes one of the letters below, and relates to immigration
____________(TRANSITION)____________
_______________M______________
_______________M______________
_______________I_______________
_______________G_______________
_______________R_______________
_______________A______________
_______________T_______________
_______________I_______________
_______________O______________
_______________N______________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Immigration Anticipation Guide
What do YOU think? T/F
1) All immigrants to the United States come from Mexico
________
2) More than 50% of all the world’s immigrants come to the U.S.
________
3) 80% of illegal immigrants cross the US/Mexico border
________
4) In 1900, the U.S. population was 15% foreign born. In 2000, the foreign born
percentage of the population is 20%:
________
5) Most immigrants come to the United States illegally
________
6) More than 10 million immigrants enter the US every year
________
7) 27 million undocumented (illegal) immigrants live in the US
_______
8) Illinois is one of six states with the highest immigrant population _______
(From the US Immigration & Naturalization Service, US Census Bureau, and the US Department of Justice)
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Teacher Version - Immigration Anticipation Guide
1) All immigrants to the United States come from Mexico = False
* 52% of immigrants come to the US from Latin America, and 26% come from
Asia
2) More than 50% of all the world’s immigrants come to the U.S. = False
* Only 2% of the world’s immigrants come to the United States
3) 80% of illegal immigrants cross the US/Mexico border = False
* Only 40% of illegal immigrants cross the Southern border
4) In 1900, the U.S. population was 15% foreign born. In 2000, the foreign born
percentage of the population is 20% = False
* Only 11% of the US population is foreign born, less than 100 years ago.
5) Most immigrants come to the United States illegally = False
* Only 25% of immigrants enter the US illegally
6) More than 10 million immigrants enter the US every year = False
* Fewer than 2 million immigrants enter the US annually
7) 27 million undocumented (illegal) immigrants live in the US = False
* Approximately 7 million people live in the US illegally
8) Illinois is one of six states with the highest immigrant population = True
* 68% of all the immigrants in the US live in just six states: California, New York,
Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, and Texas.
(From the US Immigration & Naturalization Service, US Census Bureau, and the US Department of Justice)
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Teacher Notes on Hot Seat:
“Hot Seat” is a fun and engaging activity which students enjoy so much that they don’t realize they are
learning about characterization, point of view, conflict, and even a review of important plot points. In a
traditional hot seat, students in are assigned a certain character, and then they sit in front of the class in
the “hot seat”, pretend to be a character from a novel, and answer questions from the class from the
perspective of that character. Students can use their imagination, but it is important to stay true to the
storyline, and the emotions and personality of that character.
I have modified the traditional hot seat into an activity that encompasses both Focus Lesson and Reading
Showcase.
Focus Lesson:
Step 1: Assign each person in a group of four a different character. One student must be the moderator,
but characters from the novel can change from group to group.
Step 2: Review characterization and point of view. Choose one main character, and with the class, choose
several words to describe her, how that character feels about other characters etc…
Step 3: Instruct the character to complete the same activity for the character they were assigned.
Encourage the students to use their texts, and re-read to find specific details regarding characterization.
Step 4: Have a special session with your “moderators”. Explain to them that a vibrant discussion depends on
their ability to ask insightful and controversial questions. Ask them to think about shows such as Jerry
Springer or Tyra Banks. Those shows work because the hosts ask questions that reveal deep seated
frustrations or anger on the part of the guests, not because they ask them what they had for breakfast
that morning. Give the students some examples of creating open – ended questions. For example, “How old
are you?” could be changed into “How does it feel to be 14 and be abandoned by your parents?”.
Step 6: Set expectations. Students need to walk a fine line between spirited discussion/argument, and a
rowdy free for all. The discussion are much more engaging if students argue with each other (just like
Jerry Springer), but they also need to stay on topic, not devolve into name calling or pulling hair.
Step 5: The discussions can be fostered in two different ways. The teacher can have each group complete
the activity simultaneously, and walk around between groups, or have each group perform for the class, like
a one act play. Some students may be nervous about this, but usually once they see a lively performance,
they want to outdo each other. I have had students ask if their friends can play security guards, separating
students who are pretending to want to fight, and camera men. This set up can be more raucous, but it also
allows students to learn from each others’ interpretation of the characters.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Your Character: Aisha
Name_______________________
Directions: You will be studying this character in depth so that you can pretend to be her for a
“Hot Seat” role playing activity. You need to understand HOW this character acts, and WHY she
acts this way. Before we begin, you need to prove you know this character inside and out! (If
something didn’t come up in the story, feel free to improvise, based on what you DO know!)
1) Four words/phrases to describe her:
 _________________________
2) How does she feel/ act towards Nadira?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
3) How does she feel about/act towards her
parents?
4) How does Aisha feel about/act towards the
rest of the world?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
5) Some important facts about her past
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
6) What thoughts/feelings is Aisha holding
inside?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
7) Given what you know about Aisha, what decisions do you think she will make in the
future? Will these decisions be different or similar to her previous decisions?
_________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Your Character: Nadira
Name_______________________
Directions: You will be studying this character in depth so that you can pretend to be her
for a “Hot Seat” role playing activity. You need to understand HOW this character acts,
and WHY she acts this way. Before we begin, you need to prove you know this character
inside and out! (If something didn’t come up in the story, feel free to improvise, based on
what you DO know!)
1) Four words/phrases to describe her:
_________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
2) How does she feel/ act towards Aisha?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
3) How does she feel about/act towards her
mom?
 _________________________
4) How does Nadira feel about/act towards
the rest of the world?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
5) Some important facts about her past.
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
6) What thoughts/feelings is Nadira holding
inside?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
7) Given what you know about Nadira, what decisions do you think she will make in the
future? Will these decisions be different or similar to her previous decisions?
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Your Character: Nadira’s Mom
Name_______________________
Directions: You will be studying this character in depth so that you can pretend to be her
for a “Hot Seat” role playing activity. You need to understand HOW this character acts,
and WHY she acts this way. Before we begin, you need to prove you know this character
inside and out! (If something didn’t come up in the story, feel free to improvise, based on
what you DO know!)
1) Four words/phrases to describe her:
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
3) How does she feel about/act towards
Aisha?
 _________________________
2) How does she feel/ act towards
Nadira?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
4) How does Nadira’s Mom feel about/act
towards the rest of the world?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
5) Some important facts about her past
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
6) What thoughts/feelings is Nadira’s Mom
holding inside?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
7) Given what you know about Nadira’s Mom, what decisions do you think she will make in
the future? Will these decisions be different or similar to her previous decisions?
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Your Character: Taslima
Name_______________________
Directions: You will be studying this character in depth so that you can pretend to be her
for a “Hot Seat” role playing activity. You need to understand HOW this character acts,
and WHY she acts this way. Before we begin, you need to prove you know this character
inside and out! (If something didn’t come up in the story, feel free to improvise, based on
what you DO know!)
1) Four words/phrases to describe her:
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
2) How does she feel/ act towards Nadira?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
3) How does she feel about/act towards her
parents?
 _________________________
4) How does Taslima feel about/act towards
the rest of the world?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
5) Some important facts about her past
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
6) What thoughts/feelings is Taslima holding
inside?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
7) Given what you know about Taslima, what decisions do you think she will make in the
future? Will these decisions be different or similar to her previous decisions?
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Your Character: Nadira’s Uncle
Name_______________________
Directions: You will be studying this character in depth so that you can pretend to be her
for a “Hot Seat” role playing activity. You need to understand HOW this character acts,
and WHY she acts this way. Before we begin, you need to prove you know this character
inside and out! (If something didn’t come up in the story, feel free to improvise, based on
what you DO know!)
1) Four words/phrases to describe him:
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
3) How does he feel about/act towards
Taslima? (his daughter)
 _________________________
2) How does he feel/ act towards Nadira?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
4) How does Nadira’s Uncle feel about/act
towards the rest of the world?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
5) Some important facts about his past
 _________________________
6) What thoughts/feelings is Nadira’s
Uncle holding inside?
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
 _________________________
7) Given what you know about Nadira’s Uncle, what decisions do you think he will make in
the future? Will these decisions be different or similar to his previous decisions?
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Moderator
Name____________________________
Directions: You are the Tyra Banks, or Jerry Springer of the “hot seat” activity. You
need to ask questions that will lead your classmates to let their “characters” come out.
The more interesting/controversial your questions are, the more interesting answers you
will get. Remember to ask “open ended” questions like we have worked on throughout the
year, not “yes/no” questions.
Example: “Do you like Aisha?” _______ (yes/no = BORING)
“Tell me what Aisha does that drives you crazy.” (very interesting)
1) Questions for Aisha
1) ___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
3) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) Questions for Nadira
1) ___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
3) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
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3) Questions for Nadira’s mom
1) ___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
3) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
4) Questions for Taslima
1) ___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
3) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
5) Questions for Nadira’s Uncle
1) ___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
2) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
3) __________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
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Notes on the Vocabulary:
The vocabulary levels of our students vary widely, so I tried to err on the side of
including any words they may possibly not know. I frequently assign words that no one in
my first class is familiar with, and then my second class thinks the same word is
insultingly easy. I choose five vocabulary words per week. I focus on them on Mondays
and Tuesdays, point out when they emerge in the text throughout the week, assign a
review activity on Thursdays, and then quiz students on the words on Fridays. I included a
glossary of many vocabulary words that I did not choose, that the students may also need
to learn. Any of these words could be substituted for the words I selected, although the
teacher would also need to amend the quizzes and the final.
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Week 1 – Ask Me No Questions - Vocabulary in Context
Directions:
1) Look for the vocabulary word on the page Valedictorian of your book.
2) Copy the COMPLETE sentence on the line provided.
3) Use context clues from the sentence to determine what YOU think the word means.
4) Write what you think the word means on the line next to Your Meaning.
1) mimics (page 5) ________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning ___________________________________________________
2) charred (page 22) ______________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
Your Meaning ___________________________________________________
3) blurting (page 30)__________________________________________ ___
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
4) sheepish (page 34) _____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
5) quarreled (page 40) _____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Week 2 – Ask Me No Questions - Vocabulary in Context
Directions:
1) Look for the vocabulary word on the page of your book.
2) Copy the COMPLETE sentence on the line provided.
3) Use context clues from the sentence to determine what YOU think the word means.
4) Write what you think the word means on the line next to Your Meaning.
1) lavishes (page 43) __________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
2) valedictorian (page 51) __________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
3) scowls (page 51)__________________________________________ ___
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
4) hooligans (page 57) ____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
5) bewildered (page 65) ___________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Week 3 – Ask Me No Questions - Vocabulary in Context
Directions:
1) Look for the vocabulary word on the page of your book.
2) Copy the COMPLETE sentence on the line provided.
3) Use context clues from the sentence to determine what YOU think the word means.
4) Write what you think the word means on the line next to Your Meaning.
1) skeptical (page 69) _____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
2) flagging (page 70) ____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
3) harangue (page 76)_______________________________________ ___
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
4) jurisdiction (page 86) __________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
5) ravenous (page 86) ____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Week 4 – Ask Me No Questions - Vocabulary in Context
Directions:
1) Look for the vocabulary word on the page of your book.
2) Copy the COMPLETE sentence on the line provided.
3) Use context clues from the sentence to determine what YOU think the word means.
4) Write what you think the word means on the line next to Your Meaning.
1) exasperated (page 88) __________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
2) brazen (page 94) ______________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
3) jeopardizing (page 109)_______________________________________ ___
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
4) giddy (page 116) ______________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
5) amnesty (page 121) ____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
Week 5 – Ask Me No Questions - Vocabulary in Context
Directions:
1) Look for the vocabulary word on the page of your book.
2) Copy the COMPLETE sentence on the line provided.
3) Use context clues from the sentence to determine what YOU think the word means.
4) Write what you think the word means on the line next to Your Meaning.
1) countenance (page 133) _________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
2) discrepancy (page 135) _________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
3) disheveled (page 142) ___________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
4) brooding (page 143) _________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
5) waver (page 148) ____________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Your Meaning __________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
COMPLETE ASK ME NO QUESTIONS DICTIONARY
WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Asylum
2
Noun - a refuge granted an alien by a country on its own territory.
Nestled
2
Verb - to lie close and snug
Envy
5
Noun - Unhappy feeling of wanting what someone else has
Mimics
5
Verb - to adopt somebody else's voice, gestures
Dense
6
Adjective – tightly packed/ little open space
Swabbed
7
Verb - To mop/clean something up
Deported
9
Verb - to force a foreigner to leave a country
Detainment
9
Noun - Hold in custody
Arteries
10
Noun – a main route/road
Immigrant
12
Noun - Someone moving to a new country
Blur
12
Noun - Fuzzy or unclear image
Muttering
17
verb - to speak quietly and indistinctly
Dowries
21
Noun - money or property given by a bride's family to her bridegroom
Partition
21
Noun - the division of a country into separate countries
Charred
22
verb - blackened by burning or scorching
Enlightened
27
Adjective - free of ignorance, prejudice, or superstition
Scornful
27
Adjective - feeling great contempt for somebody
Glinting
28
Noun- a momentary gleam or flash
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
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WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Blurting
30
Verb - to say something suddenly or impulsively, as if by accident
Mosque
33
Noun - a building in which Muslims worship (= to church or synagogue)
Koran
33
Noun - the sacred text of Islam, believed by Muslims to record the
Chapter 5
revelations of God to Muhammad
Sheepish
34
Adjective- showing embarrassment as a result of having done something
awkward or wrong
Sternly
40
Adverb- rigid, strict, and uncompromising
Quarreled
40
Verb - to engage in an angry dispute
Lavishes
43
Verb - giving or spending generously or to excess
Egging
43
Verb - to incite somebody to do something
Assassins
44
Noun - a killer of a political leader or other public figure
Grimaces
46
Verb - twisting of the face that expresses disgust or pain
Sauntering
49
Verb - to walk at an easy unhurried pace
Testy
51
Adjective - impatient and easily upset or annoyed
Valedictorian
51
Noun – student with the highest GPA in a graduating class
Scowls
51
Verb - expression of anger, displeasure, or menace
Affiliation
53
Noun – who you are associated with
Refugees
56
Noun- someone seeking a safe place in another country
Trudging
56
Verb - to walk with slow, heavy, weary steps
Hooligans
57
Noun – young vandal or criminal/ troublemaker
Drought
57
Noun – long period with no rain
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
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WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Plunder
57
Verb – soldiers stealing from the people they conquered
WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Gait
61
Noun - a way of walking
Persist
64
Verb – continue/ not give up
Bewildered
65
Adjective – extremely confused
Commuters
65
Noun – regular traveler from home to work
Skeptical
69
Adjective - tending not to believe or accept things but to question them
Wanly
69
Adverb – without strength or enthusiasm
Flagging
70
Verb – losing strength or desire to go forward
Smolder
71
Verb – have emotion barely kept under the surface
Skullcaps
74
Noun - a small cap worn by religious men to show respect to God or
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
Allah
Persecution
75
Noun - subjecting a race or group of people to cruel or unfair
treatment
Harangue
76
Verb - to criticize or question somebody in a forceful angry way
Scoffed
77
Verb – to laugh at or disrespect someone or their ideas
Bureaucrats
78
Noun – a government official who cares more about enforcing rules than
helping people
Cockeyed
78
Adjective - positioned at an awkward or crooked angle
Tinge
82
Noun – a small amount of something such as emotion
Defy
83
Verb – openly resist, challenge or disobey
Jurisdiction
86
Noun - the area over which legal authority extends
CHAPTER 10
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WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Ravenous
86
Adjective – extremely hungry
Fascists
87
Noun - people who have dictatorial or extreme right-wing views
WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Exasperated
88
Adjective - angry or very frustrated
Rouses
94
Verb – to wake someone up
Brazen
94
Adjective - Bold and unashamed
Skimming
100
Verb – going over the surface
Bitter
102
Adjective – angry, resentful, hard to accept
Specimens
107
Noun - a sample used for testing and diagnosis
Descent
107
Verb - going from the top to the bottom
Jeopardizing
109
Verb – putting in danger
Poise
110
Noun – composure, self – assured dignity
Clamber
114
Verb - to climb quickly but awkwardly, using hands and feet
Gnarly
114
Adjective - Full of knots; twisted
Giddy
116
Adjective - extremely happy and excited
Burrow
118
Verb - to make a hole or tunnel by digging
Ledger
118
Noun – a financial record book
Hypothetically
121
Adverb - not well supported by available evidence
Amnesty
121
Noun - a pardon, especially for those who committed political crimes
Silhouette
123
Noun - an outline filled in with black on a light background
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
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WORD
PAGE
BASIC DEFINITION
Brittle
125
Adjective - hard and likely to break or crack
Hesitate
125
Verb – pause before deciding or acting
Infractions
131
Noun - failures to obey a law, contract, or agreement
Countenance
133
Noun – face or facial expression
Vigorously
134
Adverb – to act with a lot of energy
Discrepancy
135
Noun – an error or something that doesn’t match up
Spite
140
Noun - a small-minded desire to harm or humiliate somebody
Addled
142
Adjective- confused
Disheveled
142
Adjective - with messed-up hair or clothes
Optimistic
142
Adjective- positive or hopeful view of the future
Brooding
143
Noun – deep thought about a negative situation
Jangling
143
Verb - to make a harsh metallic noise
Conquer
147
Verb – to master/beat something difficult
Waver
148
Verb – move in different directions
Reprieve
150
Verb – stop or delay someone’s punishment
Podium
150
Noun – raised platform to give a speech from
Gnawing
156
Adjective - persistent and troubling or uncomfortable
Extenuating
158
Something that makes the crime not as serious
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
circumstance
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Meaningful Sentences for selected vocabulary words:
1) mimics (page 5) Parakeets are famous for mimicking what their owners say.
2) charred (page 22) The hotdog was charred after it fell between the cracks of the grill.
3) blurting (page 30) Some students always blurt out the answer without raising their hands.
4) sheepish (page 34) The boy gave his mom a sheepish look when she caught him with his hand in
the cookie jar.
5) quarreled (page 40) The two girls were always quarreled about who got to play with the new
doll.
6) lavishes (page 43) My mom always lavishes me with gifts at Christmas.
7) valedictorian (51) The girl got straight A’s for all four years of High School so that she could
become valedictorian.
8) scowls (page 51) My mom always scowls at me when I forget to take out the garbage.
9) hooligans (page 57) The hooligans spent the entire day shoplifting from stores, and breaking
car windows.
10) bewildered (page 56) The man was bewildered by how different everything looked when he
woke up out of a coma after 10 years.
11) skeptical (page 69) I was skeptical when the man told me he would sell me a new IPod for $10.
12) flagging (page 70) The woman’s energy was flagging after she had run 20 miles in the 26 mile
marathon.
13) harangue (page 76) Drill sergeants are famous for haranguing new recruits until they get in
shape.
14) jurisdiction (page 86) The state police had to stop chasing the suspect when he crossed into
another state that wasn’t in their jurisdiction.
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15) ravenous (page 86) The girl was ravenous when she came home for dinner after basketball
practice.
16) exasperated (page 88) The teacher was exasperated when the boy came tardy every single
day.
17) brazen (page 94) The girl was brazen when she came home after curfew and didn’t try to be
quiet or make an excuse.
18) jeopardizing (page 109) The girl was jeopardizing her team’s chances to win when she got
frustrated and stormed off the court.
19) giddy (page 116) Most children are giddy with anticipation on Christmas Eve.
20) amnesty (page 121) When the library offered amnesty anyone who turned in their overdue
library books didn’t have to pay their fines.
21) countenance (page 133) The woman’s countenance changed when she found out she had a
deadly disease.
22) discrepancy (page 135) There was a discrepancy on the man’s taxes that said he owed $5,000
when he really owed $400.
23) disheveled (page 142) The man looked extremely disheveled after he got lost in the woods for
a week.
24) brooding (page 143) The girl was brooding for weeks when she thought she was fired for no
reason.
25) waver (page 148) The boy wavered on the court as he tried to decide whether he should shoot
the ball or pass it.
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Ask Me No Questions - Meaningful Sentences
Name_____________________
Directions: Change the following sentences into Meaningful sentences by adding details or
examples.
EXAMPLE: I envy that girl.  I envy that girl because she always new clothes on.
1) The bird likes to mimic people.
___________________________________________________________________
2) The hot dog was charred.
___________________________________________________________________
3) My little brother is always blurting.
___________________________________________________________________
4) I looked sheepish.
___________________________________________________________________
5) My cousin and I always quarreled when we were little.
___________________________________________________________________
6) My mom lavished me with gifts.
___________________________________________________________________
7) Everyone respected the valedictorian.
___________________________________________________________________
8) My uncle scowls a lot.
___________________________________________________________________
9) The hooligans ran away from the corner store.
___________________________________________________________________
10) My little sister was bewildered.
___________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Ask Me No Questions - Meaningful Sentences
Name____________________
Directions: Change the following sentences into Meaningful sentences by adding details or
examples.
EXAMPLE: I envy that girl.  I envy that girl because she always new clothes on.
1) I am skeptical of magicians.
___________________________________________________________________
2) My energy was flagging.
___________________________________________________________________
3) The mom harangued her sons.
___________________________________________________________________
4) The suspect was out of the police’s jurisdiction.
___________________________________________________________________
5) I am always ravenous.
___________________________________________________________________
6) My mom was exasperated.
___________________________________________________________________
7) That burglar was brazen when he robbed the house.
___________________________________________________________________
8) My cousin kept jeopardizing his grades.
___________________________________________________________________
9) The little kids were giddy.
___________________________________________________________________
10) The woman was granted amnesty.
___________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
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Meaningful Sentence Illustration
Name___________________________________
Directions: At the bottom of the page, write a meaningful sentence for one of your vocabulary
words from Ask Me No Questions. Then draw a picture that illustrates your sentence.
Your sentence: _________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
42
Ask Me No Questions – Complete Unit April Tondelli ©2009
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
IMMIGRATION GLOSSARY
Alien - A foreign-born resident who has not been naturalized and is
still a subject or citizen of a foreign country.
Day laborer - One who does short-term (even daily or hourly) work,
often with undocumented immigration status.
Green Card - A permit allowing an immigrant to live and work
indefinitely in the U.S.
Immigrant - A person who enters and usually becomes established in
a region or country where one is not a native.
INS - Immigration and Naturalization Service, the United States
government bureau charged with enforcing immigration law.
Migrant - A person who moves from one country, place or locality to
another.
Refugee - One who flees to a foreign country or power to escape
danger or persecution.
Sweatshop - Workplaces, usually industrial, that often operate under
unsafe and illegal working conditions.
Undocumented immigrant - A person who comes to a country
without the legal permission of its government. The expression "illegal
alien" is considered a negative.
Xenophobia - (pronounced zee-no-FO-bee-ah; from the Greek: xeno:
stranger; phobia: fear) Fear and hatred of strangers and foreigners.
(from www.pbs.org)
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IMMIGRATION TIMELINE
1492
Genocide of indigenous peoples begins with Christopher Columbus' arrival
in the Americas.
1619
First shipload of 20 indentured African slaves arrives in Jamestown, Virginia.
1654
First Jewish immigrants to the New World (originating from Brazil) settle in
New Amsterdam.
1717
An Act of Parliament in England legalizes transportation of criminals to work
in American colonies as punishment.
1718
Large-scale Scottish and Irish immigration begins, with most settling in New
England, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
1790
Naturalization Act: citizenship denied to "nonwhites."
1807
The U.S. Congress says it is illegal to import African slaves.
1845
A Nativist political party is founded. Ten years later, a similar anti-immigrant
"Know-Nothing" political party reaches its peak of support.
1848
Following the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gives
former Mexican lands to the United States in what is now Arizona, California,
Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. Mexican Americans lose
land to Anglos by both legal and illegal means.
1849
Discovery of gold in California lures people from all over the world, including
many from China, to work mining claims.
1860
New York becomes the largest Irish city in the world, with 203,760 Irish-born
citizens.
1863
President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation into law, ratifying the
freedom of slaves in the U.S.
1882
Chinese Exclusion Act: Chinese laborers are denied citizenship and entry
into the U.S.
1891
Immigration Act establishes the Bureau of Immigration and the first
comprehensive law for immigration control, directing the deportation of aliens
unlawfully in the U.S.
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1905
Japanese and Korean Exclusion League is formed by organized labor to
protest the influx of "coolie" labor and a perceived threat to living standards of
American workers.
1909
Halladjian Ruling: federal government re-classifies Armenians from Asiatics
to Caucasians: "...They [Armenians] learned a little bit more English than the
Japanese did and they look more American..."
1910
Mexican Revolution sends thousands of peasants to the U.S. border seeking
safety and employment.
1917
Immigration Act: Mexicans are exempted from anti-immigration laws so that
they can provide labor.
1918
Passport Act prevents arrival and departure without documentation.
Anarchists Act provides for the deportation of alien "radicals."
1921
Emergency Immigration Restriction Law introduces a quota system that
favors northern and western Europeans.
1922
Ozawa Ruling: Japanese immigrant, Takao Ozawa, challenges the Supreme
Court saying he qualified for citizenship but was denied because he was not
"Caucasian."
1923
Repatriation Act offers Filipinos transportation back to the Philippines if they
promise to never come back to the U.S.
1924
Immigration and Naturalization Act imposes the first permanent numeric limits
on immigration. The category of "Entry without Inspection" is created, officially
labeling those who cross U.S. borders without immigration documents.
The U.S. Border Patrol is created, in large part to control Chinese
immigration to the U.S. across the U.S.-Mexico border.
1940
Bracero Program (1942-1964) provides temporary residence permits to bring
Mexican workers to farmland due to labor shortage because of World War II,
but it provides no means for permanent residence or any labor protections,
housing guarantees or rights to bring family members.
1942
Large-scale Puerto Rican immigration begins as people try to escape
crushing poverty on the island, only to find similar conditions in New York.
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1945
McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act extends token
immigration quotas to Asian nations for support during World War II.
1952
Cuban Refugee Airlift begins; Cubans are admitted under special quotas.
President Johnson signs the Immigration Act, which eliminates race, creed
and nationality as a basis for admission to the U.S. As soon as the old quota
system is removed, non-European immigration levels rise.
1965
Responding to a wave of Cuban Refugees coming to the U.S. on the
"Freedom Flotilla," the Refugee Act systematizes processes for refugees and
codifies asylum status.
1980
More than 250 churches provide "sanctuary" to Salvadoran and Guatemalan
refugees.
1982
Immigration Reform and Control Act imposes employer sanctions, making it
illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers and, for the first time, a
crime to work without immigration authorization. It also increases border
enforcement.
1990
Immigration Act increases legal immigration ceilings by 40 percent; triples
employment-based immigration, which emphasizes skills; creates a diversity
admissions category; and establishes temporary protected status for those
jeopardized by armed conflict or natural disasters in their native countries.
1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(popularly known as "welfare reform") ends many forms of cash and medical
assistance for most legal immigrants and other low-income individuals.
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)
expands INS enforcement operations, eliminates basic rights of due process
for immigrants and cuts down on avenues for immigrants to legalize their
status.
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act groups provisions
regarding immigrants with those designed to curb terrorism, including a new
court to hear cases of alien deportation based on secret evidence.

From www.pbs.org

Many of these events could be used as research topics
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STUDENT
TEAM
WORK
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Notes on the Student Team Reading Guide:
I designed a number of my questions in order to help the student place themselves
in Nadira’s shoes. Many questions begin with phrases such as “If you were Nadira what
would you have done when….”. I also designed questions to fall in the higher strata of
Bloom’s taxonomy, which prompt students to predict, analyze, and apply.
Notes on the Supplementary Activities:
I wanted to encourage students to participate in active reading that extends of
the course of the novel, not just 3 - 4 discreet questions at the end of each chapter.
These activities, related to theme, significant quotes, and Bengali phrases, allow students
to draw their own knowledge from the text, and not just answer questions given by the
teacher. The significant quotes and evidence of theme activities especially give students
a chance to debate within their groups, devise a wide variety of “correct” responses, and
share out with the larger class. Because groups tend to move at different paces, and
some chapters are longer than others, these activities provide an automatic next step for
students who are finished with their guided reading questions. The themes could also be
discussed as individual Mini- Lessons, either introduced by the teacher, or presented by
the students in small groups.
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - READING GUIDE
(Most questions require a 2 – 3 sentence response)
Chapter 1
1) Why is the family driving to Canada?
2) Predict WHY they need to do this.
3) Who is Aisha, and why does she start crying when they drive through Boston?
4) What have we learned about the dynamics between the two sisters in this chapter?
5) What are some of the pros and cons about their plan?
PROS
CONS
6) How did the family get into the U.S.?
7) How was life going for them before September 11th?
8) How did September 11th change their lives?
Chapter 2
9) What does the border agent tell the family?
10) WHY?
11) How does the family react (give details from the story)
12) How would YOUR family have reacted (be specific)
13) Why is Abba arrested, and what is his plan for the girls?
14) How do you think this plan will work?
15)
What sorts of problems might Aisha and Nadira have?
Chapter 3
16) Describe five important events in Bengali history and how they have affected
Nadira’s family.
EVENT
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
AFFECT
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _
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_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _
Chapter 4
17) How did Aisha become accepted at school (be specific)
18) Do you know anyone like that? EXPLAIN.
19) Compare and contrast Aisha and Nadira
Nadira (different)
Same
Aisha (different)
__________________________
__________________
________________________
__________________________
___________________
________________________
__________________________
___________________
________________________
__________________________
__________________
________________________
___________________________
________________________
__________________________
________________________
20) Why doesn’t Nadira want to “stick together”?
21) Predict how being without their parents will affect the girl’s relationship.
Chapter 5
22) How do people at Flushing High School deal with illegal immigrants?
23) How is this similar or different than how they are/would be treated at this
high school?
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24) Why does Aisha want to keep everything a secret?
25) Is this a good idea? (Explain)
26) How is Tareq different from other Bengalis Nadira knows?
27) Why is he appealing and disgusting at the same time?
28) Who is Ali-uncle, and why do you think Nadira’s parents have her work for him after
school?
29) What news does Nadira get from her mom on page 38?
30) How do Taslima and Aisha both seem to take after their respective mothers?
31) Who is Tim, and what options does he present the family with?
32) Which one should they have taken and why?
Chapter 6
33) Why is making “good money” different if you’re an illegal alien?
34) Why is “Uncle” so angry?
35) Do you know someone like him? EXPLAIN
36) Why do you think Taslima acts so wild?
37) Do you know anyone like her? EXPLAIN
38) Who is Lily, and what is she dealing with?
39) Would you want to know the truth if you were Lily? EXPLAIN
40) How is the pressure affecting Nadira?
41) If her dad isn’t released soon, what do you think will happen to her over the
next few months?
Chapter 7
42) Summarize what we learn about Nadira’s family history in this chapter.
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43) What are the plusses and minuses of “not sticking out” (page 58)
POSITIVE
NEGATIVE
Chapter 8
44) What is Aisha’s NEW plan?
45) How does it work out?
46) What happens when Aisha is “stumped” (page 60)
47) How might this history affect Nadira and Aisha now? (predict)
48) Do you remember your first time riding the “L”? -> compare your experience
with Nadira’s experience.
49) On page 65, what is Aisha’s next plan?
50) Explain why it might work or might not work.
Chapter 9
51) What does the word “honor” mean in Nadira’s house?
52) What does it mean in yours?
53) How does the family save their money?
54) Why might the government be suspicious of that?
55) Why don’t the girls want to accept Tareq’s offer of “help”?
56) What is Taslima doing instead of going to school?
57) What would YOU do in her situation?
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58) How and why has the sisters’ relationship changed (p78)
Chapter 10
60) What happens to “Uncle”? (be specific)
61) How is the family treated at the police station (WHY)?
Chapter 11
62) Give two ways Aisha is becoming different from her friends.
63) How is the situation affecting Taslima and Aisha?
64) What does Nadira find out about Lily’s dad?
65) Do you think she should have told Lily? EXPLAIN
66) What’s going on with Uncle?
67) Why is Aisha wondering if she should go to her Barnard interview?
Chapter 12
68) When Nadira goes to Columbia, what does she realize about college?
69) Why is this important to her?
70) Why is Aisha lying to Mr. Friedlander?
71) Is lying to Mr. Friedlander a good idea? EXPLAIN
72) What are Aisha’s teachers worried about?
73) Are their concerns valid? EXPLAIN
Chapter 13
74) How does Nadira’s story about swimming connect to this story? (what did she learn
from that experience that she can apply to her current situation?)
75) What news does Nadira get from her and how does she react to it?
76) Predict what Nadira is going to do with the $3000.
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Chapter 14
77) What is Nadira getting Tareq’s “help” with?
78) Is this a good idea/will it work?
79) Why can’t Nadira go through with it?
80) What would you do?
Chapter 15
81) Where does Nadira go?
82) What is her new plan?
83) Does it work? WHY?
84) Was it “smart”? Give three reasons why or why not.
Chapter 16
85) How have the dynamics (relationships) in the family changed?
86) What has Aisha been doing, and what is her motivation?
87) What is Taslima doing, and what is her motivation?
88) What do Auntie and Uncle decide to do, and what is their motivation?
89) What does the government letter say, and why does Aisha react so negatively
to it?
90) Why does Nadira call Aisha a “coward” on page 147?
91) Do you agree? EXPLAIN.
Chapter 17
92) Summarize Aisha’s valedictorian speech.
93) What POINT is she trying to make?
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94) Do you think a speech like this would be effective for this audience? (Would this
audience be more positive than other audiences?)
Chapter 18
95) What is the meaning of Nadira’s dream on page 152? (analyze/interpret) ____
96) Why is the family stunned when Ma comes out of the bathroom?
97) Why do YOU think she chose to dress this way?
98) How would your mom have dressed?
99) What are the family’s “extenuating circumstances”?
100) How did these circumstances influence the judge’s ruling?
REFLECTION
101) How did Nadira change because of this process?
102) Was this process positive or negative for her?
103) Given what you know, what advice would you give a Bangladeshi family living
illegally in the U.S.? (be specific)
104) What did you learn about Bengals/Bengali culture & history from this story?
105) What did you learn about immigration?
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BENGALI PHRASE GLOSSARY (You may need to use the internet)
PHRASE/WORD
1)
SIGNIFICANCE/MEANING
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12)
13)
14)
15)
16)
17)
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Significant Quotes
Chapter
1
Quote
Speaker
Significance
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
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THEME: As you read Ask Me No Questions, look for examples of the theme your group
has been assigned. Write down the example, the page number, and how this example
relates to the theme. You will be presenting your theme to the class at the end of the
story.
MY THEME: ___________________________________________________
Page Example/ Quote
#
Relationship to Theme
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CHARACTER CHART
CHARACTER Description
Relationship to Nadira
How does this
character change?
REFLECT: Which character changed the most? Provide evidence from the text to support
your answer.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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WRITING/
RESEARCH
ACTIVITIES
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Notes on the Writing Topics:
The writing topics all focus on students discussing personal experiences related to
Nadira’s experiences in the novel. Once again, students who may think they have nothing
in common with a 15 year old, illegal, Bangladeshi immigrant will learn that every teenager
face issues such as not getting along with siblings, or struggling to deal with increasing
amounts of responsibility, or trying to keep a secret.
On a practical note, I usually assign writing topics once or twice per week.
However, this is a 6 week unit and I have included 24 potential writing topics. This allows
students who love to write, who need extra credit, or are always finished early with their
work to complete three or four topics per week.
On Fridays, usually once or twice per week I encourage students to share one of
their writing topics with the class. I believe that the public speaking part of many of our
state standards is often overlooked, and reading a topic to the class allows the student
to take a small step towards more formal public speaking activities like making a speech. I
usually try to conduct a topic reading day after several topics have been assigned so that
students can choose their favorite or least embarrassing topic.
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - WRITING TOPICS
PRE - READING
1) Does your family have a secret that they keep from the outside world, or something they tried
to keep a secret? Why did they feel that they needed to keep the secret? If the secret got out,
what happened? Did the family tell YOU, or did you find out on your own?
OR
2) Describe a time you had a secret, or someone told you a secret. What happened? Did the
information stay a secret? If the secret got out, what was the result? Do you think it’s good or
bad for people to try to keep secrets?
DURING READING
Chapter 1
3) SIBLINGS - Describe the sibling relationships in your family. Who gets along with whom, and
who always gets in fights? Who gets along the best with your parents? Does that get on other
siblings’ nerves? If one sibling is “in charge”, do the other siblings respect their authority? Try to
think of a specific incident or story that shows how you get along with your brothers and sisters.
Chapter 2
4) Have your parents ever left you/ your siblings alone for a night or a weekend? How did it go?
Did people follow the rules? Discuss the good and bad aspects of being given a lot of
responsibility by your parents.
Chapter 4
5) What do you know about your family’s history? Why did they move to Chicago? How were they
treated when they first got here? Did other members of your family move to Chicago also? (you
may need to talk to your parents or grandparents to answer this question)
Chapter 5
6) Do you trust your friends with your secrets or problems? In the book, Nadira doesn’t tell
anyone, even her best friend Lily, the problems her family is facing. What would you do in this
situation, or a similar situation? Have you ever trusted a friend with personal information and had
it not work out well? Describe that experience.
Chapter 6
7) In the book, Taslima’s parents are very upset that she is dating an American or outsider, even
though he is trying to help the family. Would your family feel the same way? Why do you feel like
it’s so important to the family that the girls date other Bengals? Do people who believe in dating
your same race or ethnic group have a point? If anyone in your family has dated someone of
another race or nationality, how did it work out?
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - WRITING TOPICS Continued…
Chapter 7
8) Do you know how your parents, grandparents or aunts & uncles first met? Was it love at first
sight? Did one person have to chase after the other? How did their families react?
Chapter 8
9) Have you, or anyone close to you, had any experiences with the legal system? Did the lawyers
help, or do their job properly? What did you learn from the experience? Do you feel that the
American legal system is fair? Explain why or why not.
Chapter 9
10) Have you ever been tempted to date a “bad boy” or “bad girl”, a rebel, or someone with a
criminal record who your parents wouldn’t approve of? What made you attracted to that person?
How did it work out?
OR
11) Have you ever been tempted to take the easy way out of difficult situation by lying, stealing
etc…? What was the situation, and how were you tempted? If you were faced with that situation
again, what would you do?
Chapter 10
12) Have you ever been to visit someone in jail or prison? Describe that experience. Do you feel
that the person you were visiting was treated fairly while they were locked up? Do you feel that
you and other visitors were given the information you needed, and treated with respect? If not,
how did you react?
Chapter 11
13) Have you ever felt like you had a big problem, and the people who were supposed to help you
(teachers, parents, friends etc.) weren’t listening to you, or you couldn’t tell them for some
reason? What happened? Were you able to resolve the problem?
OR
14) Has someone close to you ever given up on their dreams or their future? For example,
dropping out of school, attempting suicide, running away, using drugs etc… What did you say to
them? What made them feel like they should give up? What happened in the long run?
Chapter 12
15) Have you visited or toured a college campus? What did you think about that experience? Could
you see yourself attending that school? Why or why not? If you have friends, cousins etc. that
currently attend college, where do they go? How do they feel about the college experience? Have
they given you any advice about college?
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - WRITING TOPICS Continued…
Chapter 13
16) Do you know how to swim? If you do, who taught you or how did you learn? Was that
experience scary? If you don’t know how to swim, have you tried to learn? What happened? Do
you still go in water?
Chapter 14
17) Have you ever been in a situation (a party, a car etc…) when you didn’t know if you could trust
the person you were with, or feel like they were putting you in danger? What happened? Why did
you choose to spend time with that person? What would you do if you are in a situation like that
again?
Chapter 15
18) Have you ever felt like you had to be the adult/parent in a family situation? What happened?
Why did you have to be the responsible one? What did you learn from that experience?
Chapter 16
19) Have your parents ever found out that you or one of your siblings was keeping a secret from
them (such as messing up in school)? How did they find out? How did they react to the news? Did
you or your sibling get punished?
OR
20) Has someone ever appeared or disappeared from your life unexpectedly? What happened?
Why did they come or go so quickly? If they left without you getting to say goodbye, how did you
feel about that? What would you say to them today if you could?
Chapter 17
21) Have you ever had stage fright, or been nervous about speaking or performing in front of
other people? What happened?
OR
22) If you could speak to your entire school, what would you say? Do you think people would react
positively or negatively to your thoughts/ideas? Why?
Chapter 18
23) Describe a situation that forced you to grow up, the way her dad getting locked up forced
Nadira to grow up. What were some of the good and bad things about this experience? Do you
ever wish you could still be a kid, or can you not wait to become a full adult? EXPLAIN.
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - RAFT TOPICS
R.A.F.T. stands for Role, Audience, Format, Topic.
ROLE - Students pretend to be a certain person (their role), and write from that person’s
perspective. For example; Nadira, Taslima, or any of the other characters in the novel.
AUDIENCE - The audience is the intended audience of the piece of writing. For example; a
newspaper editor, a friend, a teacher, or a politician.
FORMAT - The format that the writing will utilize, such as a letter.
TOPIC - The topic of the piece of writing.
POSSIBLE RAFTS FOR ASK ME NO QUESTIONS:
1) Pretend you are Nadira. Write series of letters to your father in prison after reading every
one or two chapters. Explain to him what is going on in your life, as well as the emotions you are
dealing with while he is incarcerated. Also, ask him questions about his life in prison.
2) Pretend you are Abba, Nadira’s dad, and write back to your daughter. How is your life in
prison? Are you being interrogated? How do your fellow prisoners and guards treat you? How is
the food? (Keep in mind that you may want to shield your daughter from the true horrors of the
experience, or you may want her to tell the world about your treatment). Are you worried about
your daughters and your other family members? Ask her questions about her life and about
school etc…
3) Pretend you are Aisha, write a letter to Mr. Friedlander about why you have been acting so
strangely. Ask him for help getting your life back on track.
4) Pretend you are Taslima, write a letter to your parents about why you are dropping out of
school, marrying a white man, cutting your hair short etc… Discuss IF you still care about them,
or why you felt that you needed to break away from your traditional Bengali culture.
5) Pretend you are Aisha or Nadira, write a letter to a local politician, such as your congressmen,
about your situation. Make specific suggestions about what this person could do to help your
family, or other families in similar situations. What do you think they should do to change US
immigration laws/enforcement? Remember, this person has never met you, so you need to spend a
little time writing about the background of your situation.
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Notes on the DREAM Act Mini – Research Essay
Preparing students to compose college level writing has been a constant issue in my
English department. While the students write a research paper their senior year, they
are often woefully unprepared for this task, and the results can be truly dreadful. Our
department is also trying to increase the quality and quantity of our writing because of
the writing addition to the ACT. In response to this challenge, we have been utilizing a
graphic organizer called the PPE, point, proof, explanation. This graphic organizer is
supposed to help students organize their thoughts, and include a source/quote for each
point they make.
In the fall I gave my sophomores a persuasive essay that included one source (our
text), and required a quote to accompany each body paragraph. For this assignment, I
offered them several articles from the Chicago Tribune, as well as the guide for
“Educating non-citizens” from Deliberating in a Democracy (www.deliberating.org). I
highly recommend this guide as a starting point for background information, additional
sources, and presenting both sides of the argument. Their site is designed for high school
educators, and contains information on many current policy debates.
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The DREAM Act – Pros & Cons
Name________________________
As we read about the Dream Act, write down several reasons people support
the bill, and several reasons people oppose it.
SUPPORT
OPPOSE
CONNECT: What side makes more sense to YOU? WHY? __________
_____________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________
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The DREAM ACT Essay Brainstorm
Name________________
STEP 1: Summarize 3 – 5 important components of the Dream Act
1) ____________________________________________
2) ____________________________________________
3) ____________________________________________
4) ____________________________________________
5) ____________________________________________
STEP 2: Using your News Articles and Ask Me No Questions brainstorm 3 5 ideas about if the Dream Act is a good idea or bad idea.
REASON 1: ________________________________________
_________________________________________________
REASON 2: _______________________________________
_________________________________________________
REASON 3: _______________________________________
_________________________________________________
REASON 4: _______________________________________
_________________________________________________
REASON 5: _______________________________________
_________________________________________________
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Background Information from www.dreamact.info
Approximately 2.8 million students will graduate from US High Schools every year. Some will go on to
college; others will join the military or take another path in life. But they will get the opportunity to test
their dreams and live their American story. However, a group of about 65,000 students a year will not
have this opportunity because they bear the inherited title of undocumented immigrant. These highly
motivated individuals have lived in the United States all their lives and want nothing more than to be
given the chance to become Americans.
The DREAM Act ‒ introduced by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and Rep. Howard Berman of
California ‒ can solve this growing problem. Under the rigorous provisions of the DREAM Act,
undocumented young people could be eligible for a conditional path to citizenship in exchange for
completion of a college degree or two years of military service. Undocumented young people must also
demonstrate good moral character to be eligible for and stay in conditional residency. At the end of the
process, the young person can finally become an American citizen. The DREAM Act Portal hopes to
turn this dream into a reality.
Purpose
The purpose of the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act, also called the DREAM
Act, is to help those individuals who meet certain requirements, have an opportunity to enlist in the
military or go to college and have a path to citizenship which they otherwise would not have without this
legislation. Supporters of the DREAM Act believe it is vital not only to the people who would benefit
from it, but also the United States as a whole. It would give an opportunity to undocumented immigrant
students who have been living in the U.S. since they were young, a chance to contribute back to the
country that has given so much to them and a chance to utilize their hard earned education and talents.
Would I qualify?
The following is a list of specific requirements one would need in order to qualify for the current version
of the DREAM Act.





Must have entered the United States before the age of 16 (i.e. 15 and younger)
Must have been present in the United States for at least five (5) consecutive years prior to
enactment of the bill
Must have graduated from a United States high school, or have obtained a GED, or have been
accepted into an institution of higher education (i.e. college/university)
Must be between the ages of 12 and 35
Must have good moral character
If you have met all those requirements and can prove it, once the DREAM Act passes you will be able to
do the following:
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What do I need to do if the DREAM Act should pass?
If the DREAM Act passes, an undocumented individual meeting those qualifying conditions stated
above, would have to do the following:
1.
2.
a.
b.
3.
4.
Apply for the DREAM Act (Since the legislation has not yet passed, there are no specific
guidelines on how to apply)
Once approved and granted Conditional Permanent Residency, the individual would have to
do one of the following:
Enroll in an institution of higher education in order to pursue a bachelor's degree or
higher degree or
Enlist in one of the branches of the United States Military
Within 6 years of approval for conditional permanent residency, the individual must have
completed at least two (2) years of one of the options outlined in the previous step
Once 5 ½ years of the 6 years have passed, the individual will then be able to apply for Legal
Permanent Residency (dropping the conditional part) and consequently will be able to apply for United
States Citizenship
Those who have already completed at least 2 years of college education towards a bachelor's degree or
higher degree, will still have to wait the 5 ½ years in order to apply for Legal Permanent Residency even
though you may have already obtained a degree.
Students who do not complete the requirements will be disqualified .
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INTRODUCTION
SENTENCE 1-2: (Explain how illegal immigration is a controversial topic in
America today & the problems that young undocumented immigrants face)
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
SENTENCE 2-4: (EXPLAIN WHAT THE DREAM ACT IS)
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
THESIS STATEMENT: (STATE YOUR 3 REASONS WHY THE DREAM ACT
IS GOOD OR BAD)
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
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QUESTION: Is the DREAM ACT a good idea? Reason 1
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
SOURCE:
___________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
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QUESTION: Is the DREAM ACT a good idea? Reason 2
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
SOURCE:
___________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
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QUESTION: Is the DREAM ACT a good idea? Reason 3
ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – Marina Budhos
SOURCE:
___________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
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WORKS CITED PAGE
Name___________________________
Directions: List the articles you used to write your essay in the following format.
Tondelli, April. “Why are Some Students Tardy Every Day?”
(Author’s last name, author’s 1st name)
(Title of the article in quotes)
The Clemente Daily News 9 March 2010.
(Name of the newspaper)
(Date)
1) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
2) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
3) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
4) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
5) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
6) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
7) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
8) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
9) ___________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
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DREAM Act Essay Organizer
Step 1: TITLE: ______________________________________________________
Step 2: INTRODUCTION
1) Summarize Problems young illegal/undocumented immigrants face in America.
2) Summarize the DREAM Act and how it helps young illegal immigrants.
3) State 3 reasons you SUPPORT or OPPOSE the DREAM Act
Step 3: Body Paragraph 1
1) Write your 1st POINT
2) Give your PROOF (in the form of a QUOTE)
3) EXPLAIN your point and your proof
Step 4: Body Paragraph 2
1) Write your 1st POINT
2) Give your PROOF (in the form of a QUOTE)
3) EXPLAIN your point and your proof
Step 5: Body Paragraph 3
1) Write your 1st POINT
2) Give your PROOF (in the form of a QUOTE)
3) EXPLAIN your point and your proof
Step 6: Conclusion
1) Summarize your 3 POINTS
2) Discuss how the DREAM Act would help/hurt young people in America
3) Explain how America will be better or worse place if the DREAM Act passes in
Congress
Step 7: Works Cited Page (List all the articles you used)
EXAMPLE:
Schmich, Mary. “Undocumented and Unafraid”
The Chicago Tribune 10 March 2010.
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Persuasive Essay Rubric: The DREAM Act
Teacher Name: A Tondelli Student Name:
CATEGO
20 - Above Standards
RY
________________________________________
15 Meets Standards
10 – Approaching
Standards
5 - Below Standards
Focus or
Thesis
Statement
The thesis statement names the The thesis statement
topic of the essay and outlines
names the topic of the
the main points to be discussed. essay.
The thesis statement
outlines some or all of the
main points to be
discussed but does not
name the topic.
Evidence
and
Examples
All of the evidence and
examples are specific, relevant
and explanations are given that
show how each piece of
evidence supports the author's
position.
Most of the evidence
and examples are
specific, relevant and
explanations are given
that show how each
piece of evidence
supports the author's
position.
At least one of the pieces Evidence and examples
of evidence and
are NOT relevant AND/OR
examples is relevant and are not explained.
has an explanation that
shows how that piece of
evidence supports the
author's position.
Sequencin Arguments and support are
g
provided in a logical order that
makes it easy and interesting to
follow the author's train of
thought.
Arguments and support
are provided in a fairly
logical order that
makes it reasonably
easy to follow the
author's train of
thought.
A few of the support
details or arguments are
not in an expected or
logical order, distracting
the reader and making
the essay seem a little
confusing.
Audience
Demonstrates a
general understanding
of the potential reader
and uses vocabulary
and arguments
appropriate for that
audience.
Demonstrates some
It is not clear who the
understanding of the
author is writing for.
potential reader and uses
arguments appropriate
for that audience.
Conclusion The conclusion restates the
thesis, states how the policy
would affect America/young
undocumented students in the
future.
The conclusion
includes a vague:
restatement of the
thesis, how the policy
would affect
America/young
undocumented
students in the future.
The statement is missing
one of the following
elements: restatement of
the thesis, how the policy
would affect
America/young
undocumented students
in the future.
Citations
3 quotes are present
but they may be
incorrectly cited. The
works cited page is
incomplete.
Less than 3 quotes are
There are no quotes, or
present and some quotes the quotes are incorrect.
are incorrectly cited. The There are no citations.
works cited page is not
included
Demonstrates a clear
understanding of the potential
reader and uses appropriate
vocabulary and arguments.
Anticipates reader's questions
and provides thorough answers
appropriate for that audience.
All quotes are cited correctly
and include quotation marks.
The works cited page includes
correct MLA citation for all
articles.
Pros/Cons _____/10
Brainstorm _____/10
PPE 1 ______/10
The thesis statement does
not name the topic AND
does not preview what will
be discussed.
Many of the support
details or arguments are
not in an expected or
logical order; distracting
the reader and making the
essay seem very
confusing.
The conclusion is missing
more than one of the
following: restatement of
the thesis, how the policy
is affecting students, or
suggestions for next year
PPE 2 _____ /10
PPE 3 ______/10
TOTAL: _________/170
COMMENTS: ____________________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
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Articles Related to the DREAM ACT:
Youth step up in immigration debate
Undocumented students go public to push reforms
By Antonio Olivo Tribune reporter
January 18, 2010
When she was a top student in her Chicago high school French class last year, Reyna Wences tried
every excuse to avoid a planned field trip to Quebec. She secretly longed to join but knew she'd be
arrested if she tried.
"Is it the money?" she recalled her teacher at Walter Payton Prep asking.Wences, fed up with the
double life she'd been leading since her parents brought her into the country illegally nine years ago,
finally said: "You know what? I'm undocumented."
In an event that might have been stymied by fear even a year ago, Wences and more than a dozen
other undocumented students will risk making their status even more public Monday at a four-hour
"coming out" summit in Pilsen coordinated by a new group hoping to push harder for reforms to the
nation's immigration system.
The Immigrant Youth Justice League, made up of about 15 Chicago-area students, is part of a wave of
younger immigrant activists around the U.S. using more aggressive, in-your-face tactics to seek legal
status as part of a volatile national debate that has stalled in Congress in recent years. They see an
expected renewal of the debate this year as a last, best stand.
The students whose activism was born during massive immigrant marches in Chicago and elsewhere
years ago, have been behind several smaller recent battles, bouncing between Facebook campaigns
and old-school organizing with equal ease.
In Chicago, they helped drive rallies staged on behalf of Rigo Padilla, 21, a Mexican-born student at the
University of Illinois at Chicago who won a one-year stay of deportation last month. Outside an
immigrant detention center in Miami, another group of students staged rallies that helped win a similar
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deferral for two Venezuelan brothers at Miami-Dade College.
"(These youth) are maturing politically, they are becoming more sophisticated in their strategies and are
also recognizing that something more drastic needs to be done to achieve their legal status," said Nilda
Flores-Gonzalez, a sociology professor at UIC who has been tracking youth activism in the immigration
movement.
A spokeswoman in Chicago for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicated Sunday
that, despite their public declarations, the students would not necessarily be a high-priority for arrest.
"With limited resources, ICE prioritizes its enforcement actions based on implications to national security
and public safety," Gail Montenegro wrote in an e-mail.
The Immigrant Youth Justice League was inspired by ongoing efforts to pass the so-called Dream Act,
legislation that would grant conditional legal status to students who arrived as children. But the group,
mostly Mexican-born, derives mainly from the Padilla campaign.
"There was this feeling that, if we can win that, there's so much more we could do as a group," said
Tania Unzueta, 26, who, along with Padilla, is a founding member of the group.
Their success may depend on how comfortable the group's growing membership is with risking
deportation.
Like Wences, many have kept their family histories secret. Brought into the U.S. as children, they know
this country far better than their homelands and often speak English more naturally than any other
language.
"I was really afraid of coming home from school and not finding my mom or not finding my brother," said
Wences, 18.
For Uriel Sanchez, 18, the frustrations of not having legal status surfaced a week before he was set to
start as a freshman at DePaul University last fall.
Though he had been promised financial aid for tuition, the money quickly evaporated when a school
administrator asked him to provide a Social Security number, Sanchez said.
"I knew that there would be absolutely no way to pay the thousands of dollars toward tuition," Sanchez
said.
Sanchez now attends the more affordable Harold Washington College, where he studies political
science. He expressed bitterness while reading a statement in English-accented Spanish at a news
conference last week.
"When we fail to speak up, when we fail to criticize ... " he said. "It is a far greater blow to the freedom,
the decency and to the justice which truly represents this nation we call home."
----------aolivo@tribune.com
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
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Student's deportation is stayed
UIC junior who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor DUI reprieved
By Antonio Olivo Tribune reporter
December 11, 2009
Reversing course, the Obama administration granted a one-year reprieve Thursday to Rigo Padilla, an
undocumented college student whose months-long quest to avoid being kicked out of the country has
fueled street rallies, an Internet campaign and growing congressional attention.
After his arrest in January, Padilla, 21, had been ordered to leave by Dec. 16 for his native Mexico,
where he hasn't been since he was 6, when his family crossed the border illegally for a new life in
Chicago.
"It would have been very scary to not be able to stay," Padilla said, shortly after appearing at a news
conference in the Loop where supporters chanted his name. "I was trying to find family in Mexico."
The decision showed a sympathetic approach to illegal immigration even as the Obama administration
talks tough about enforcement in preparation for new congressional debates over immigration reforms
expected early next year.
Padilla's illegal status was discovered in the wake of a drinking and driving arrest earlier this year, and
his battle to stay in the U.S. at least long enough to graduate from the University of Illinois at Chicago
did not initially garner much support.
On paper, the soft-spoken UIC junior and sociology major was one more criminal caught up in an
aggressive Department of Homeland Security effort to weed out drunk drivers, rapists and hardened
felons in the country illegally -- a collective image that in the past has helped foil efforts for federal
immigration reforms in Congress.
But, in what became a grass-roots movement that expressed mounting frustrations over the lack of
reforms and ongoing deportations, Padilla -- who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DUI charge -- worked
to counter that image by emphasizing his campus leadership, academic accomplishments and otherwise
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clean record.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security called the decision to allow Padilla to stay a
"practical" one, citing President Barack Obama's eagerness to pass comprehensive immigration reforms
that would make legalization possible for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
"DHS grants stays of deportation on a case-by-case basis after a careful review of the facts surrounding
each individual's particular situation," said Matt Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman, in an emailed statement. "Situations such as this demonstrate the continued need for comprehensive reform of
our nation's immigration laws."
Chandler would not comment on Padilla's DUI arrest.
For groups seeking more aggressive enforcement against illegal immigration, overlooking Padilla's DUI
is a sign of weakness by the Obama administration, particularly when some Americans may be less
forgiving during a sour economy.
"It's your basic run-of-the-mill political pandering and it sends a very bad message to others who have no
respect for our laws," said Dave Gorak, director of the Midwest Coalition to Reduce Immigration, a
loosely affiliated network based in Wisconsin.
The decision suggests Homeland Security is beginning to view cases like Padilla's differently as
renewed congressional debate looms and supporters push for legislation that would grant conditional
legal status to undocumented students who arrived as children.
Padilla's application for a stay of deportation cited the DUI arrest as "only one negative factor" during a
life in Chicago filled with academic honors and leadership at UIC and, previously, at Harold Washington
College.
In August, that plea wasn't enough to convince a federal immigration judge that Padilla should be
allowed to stay, said Kalman Resnick, Padilla's attorney. Politicians in favor of immigration reforms also
were initially reluctant to support Padilla.
But rallies on Padilla's behalf organized by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights,
along with an Internet campaign driven by students and UIC faculty, eventually turned the struggle into a
symbolic political cause that threatened to escalate into civil disobedience.
In Congress, U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., introduced legislation last week that would grant Padilla
permanent legal status, while staffers for U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., began making inquiries to
DHS about his case this week.
"Unfortunately, Rigo's saga illustrates the plight of so many like him," Schakowsky said in a statement.
"We cannot solve the thousands of heartbreaking cases one-by-one."
Padilla will have to apply for an extension of the reprieve next December. For now, he said he is more
focused on getting through finals week at UIC.
"I still have two more papers to turn in," Padilla said as friends celebrated around him. "My teachers are
going to kill me if I don't."
aolivo@tribune.com
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
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Undocumented and unafraid
Participants march in Union Park in Chicago Wednesday as part of the Immigrant Youth Justice
League's national immigration rights mobilization. The group proceeded to the Federal Plaza in
downtown Chicago, where they were going to continue the demonstration. (Tribune photo by
Zbigniew Bzdak / March 10, 2010)
Mary Schmich
Chicago Tribune
March 10, 2010
Her name is Tania, and she's undocumented.
"It's a radical act just to say it," she says, sitting in her workplace, which for this column she'd rather not
identify.
Tania is 26, a University of Illinois at Chicago graduate with a good job, and on an ordinary day she's
gregarious and confident.
But when she speaks the thorny truth that she's carried inside since she was 10 years old — a truth that
could get her fired or deported, could harm her family and alienate her friends — her hands tremble and
her eyes dart off.
"It's so" — she curls her fingers and gently touches her throat — "personal."
The floor of this little room is carpeted in freshly painted banners. Tania and some friends were here the
night before, painting slogans like "Undocumented & Unafraid."
On Wednesday, they'll carry their banners through downtown and Tania will stand up in Federal Plaza to
say, "My name is Tania, and I'm undocumented."
Seven other young people — no last names — will stand with her and do the same.
They're calling it a "coming-out" rally, an approach inspired by both the gay-rights movement and earlier
immigration marches, and they hope to inspire a lot more people their age to reveal themselves.
But sitting in a chair on a gray afternoon, despite the slogans on the banners at her feet, Tania's voice
cracks.
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Even though her name has been in the newspaper before, she's afraid to have it there now. She says no
to a photo. I coax.
Then I realize: This is the point.
Legions of young people like her — brought here as children by their parents, now American in every
way but the paperwork — continue to live squeezed between the desire to speak out and the reflex to
hide.
Tania and hundreds of thousands like her have grown up vilified and marginalized. No matter how
honest they are otherwise, they're trapped in a subterfuge they did not create.
"I worry about the mental health of undocumented youth," Tania says, "listening consistently to attacks."
Sixteen years ago, Tania's parents brought her and her younger sister to the United States on tourist
visas. They stayed for the reason millions of other immigrants have: work.
Tania learned early to keep quiet about her status. Kids do. She didn't feel the strong pinch of life without
documents until she attended Lincoln Park High School, where she was in the International
Baccalaureate program and captain of the swim team.
When a student group went to France, she didn't have a visa, so said she was too busy to go.
When other swimmers became summer lifeguards, she had no valid Social Security card, so claimed
she had other plans.
On the advice of a counselor, she applied to college as an international student. After she was admitted
to Bryn Mawr and Earlham, she took her first trip back to Mexico, hoping to get the papers to enroll. Her
passport was confiscated, and after her story became public, she made it home to Chicago on a oneyear humanitarian visa.
She wound up at UIC. Once, in a class on immigration, she raised a hand and said, "I'm undocumented."
Afterward, the teacher warned, "Be careful where you say that."
Tania remains careful. But last fall, after she helped lead a successful campaign to stop the deportation
of Rigo Padilla, an undocumented student, she and three friends thought: What now?
They formed the Immigrant Youth Justice League. In recent months, they've recruited members and
connected with national groups advocating a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally.
With the help of some of their former teachers, they've taken their coming-out message to students,
many of whom will march Wednesday.
Anyone who watches the march with an open mind will see that these young people aren't aliens.
They're us. They are Chicago, and the immigration laws are squandering their energy and possibilities.
In other words, squandering our possibilities.
And her full name, which she finally says is OK to use, is Tania Unzueta. She is undocumented. She is
trying not to be afraid.
mschmich@tribune.com
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Students risk dreams -- and deportation -- in walk for
recognition
By Elizabeth M. Nunez, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Some kids brought or sent to U.S. come close to American Dream, only to face deportation

Dream Act would let those who arrived in U.S. before 16 to obtain residency


About 65,000 undocumented teens graduate from high school each year
Opponents view act as way to grant amnesty to illegal aliens
(CNN) -- When he first arrived in the United States, 14-year-old Felipe Matos liked to go to the supermarket
after school just to walk the aisles.
"There was so much food! I would just look at the milk -- there's like 50 types of milk!"
Miami, Florida, was a world apart from the poor neighborhood in Brazil where he was raised by a single
mother and older sister. Now 24, he recalls "lacking everything" at home in Duque de Caxias, on the outskirts
of Rio de Janeiro.
There was no running toilet, and most of the time not enough food to go around. "I would be the only one at
home allowed to drink a cup of milk," he says.
When his mother fell ill and could no longer work as a maid to support her family, she sent Felipe to Florida to
live with a sister.
"It was one of the saddest days of my life. I was so scared. I got in the plane crying a lot and people didn't
know what was happening because I only spoke Portuguese."
Felipe's story is like that of many children and teenagers who are brought or sent to the United States. Their
families hope to escape hardship, persecution or poverty. The children study hard and excel in school.
Then, just as the dream of getting a college education or a job is within grasp, they learn that they face
deportation. As undocumented adults, they can attend college but are ineligible for financial aid. They must
pay the steep tuition costs charged to foreign students.
The stellar future of a promising student becomes the uncertain one of an undocumented immigrant.
The greatest opportunity for young people like Felipe lies in the passage of the federal Development, Relief
and Education for Alien Minors Act, also known as the Dream Act. In a 2009 report, The College Board
estimated 65,000 undocumented students graduate each year from high school. The legislation would enable
those who arrived in the United States before 16 and have lived here at least five consecutive years to obtain
residency.
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Felipe entered the country on a tourist visa and enrolled in middle school.
"My sister said to me, 'This is a country of opportunities. If you work hard, you will make it. Our mother worked
hard so the only thing I ask is that you do well in school and make her proud.' And that's what I did."
He spoke no English and stayed up nights translating textbooks and memorizing the lessons. He wrote plays
that won regional competitions and graduated with honors.
But high school graduation seemed to signal the end of the road. Without money for tuition and ineligible for
financial aid, he got a job and started saving for college. When a friend told him about Miami-Dade College's
honors program, he applied and was able to afford tuition with a scholarship and help from his family.
By the time he graduated with an associate degree in international affairs, Felipe had been elected student
government president and was recognized as one of 20 New Century Scholars nationwide. He got accepted
to American University, Tulane, Duke and Florida International University, but could attend none without
financial aid.
The University of St. Thomas, a Catholic college in St. Paul, Minnesota, awarded him a scholarship.
He hoped to become a teacher "because I believe that the way out of poverty is getting an education." But
that dream ended when he learned he would need a Social Security number to teach. He then chose to study
law but discovered his undocumented status would prevent him from taking the bar exam.
"I asked them, 'tell me something that I can study so that I can have a degree.' I chose economics so that I
can at least work in development."
One of many dreams
At Miami-Dade, Felipe had learned he was not alone in his plight. He joined Students Working for Equal
Rights and met its founder, Gaby Pacheco.
Pacheco came to the U.S. from Ecuador at 7. With three degrees in education, the 25-year-old wants to teach
autistic children. But first she must resolve her undocumented status.
Juan Rodriguez is a 20-year-old Colombian who after 13 years in the U.S. became a resident in 2008. Carlos
Roa, 22, was a toddler when his sister brought him from Venezuela. He harbored hopes of joining the military.
With these three members of the student activist group, Felipe joined in demonstrating against the detention
of classmates and friends. But with little attention from authorities, they decided to stop waiting and start
walking -- all the way to Capitol Hill -- to draw attention to their situation. They began the 1,500-mile journey
from Miami on January 1.
Traveling in an unmarked RV donated by the Florida Immigration Coalition, the four get out every day to walk
from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
They stop to speak about discrimination but mostly they want to hear others' stories. At times, more than 100
people have joined them in the walk. They've traversed Klux Klux Klan territory, sat with immigrant day
laborers, received donations, food, places to stay and support in the unlikeliest places.
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Follow their journey at http://www.trail2010.org/.
Making friends along the way
In South Carolina, they were surprised by the unexpected generosity of an African-American woman who was
cleaning a church where they stopped to rest.
"She drove to meet us and gave us five bucks," Felipe recalls. "That's how we've been paying for everything.
This is what makes me get up and put on my shoes every morning."
For the dreamers, as they call themselves, the walk gives voice to those who, out of fear, can not speak out -such as the 18-year-old student from Peru who was detained by immigration officials on Friday as she waited
for the tri-rail train to go to Miami-Dade College.
"Hardly a week or two goes by that we don't hear one of our students got picked up by immigration," says
Eduardo Padron, president of Miami-Dade College, which has an enrollment of about 175,000 students.
"Many of these young people are the best students in their classes -- valedictorians -- and when they are
ready to go to college they cannot afford it," Padron says.
The Dream Act was first introduced in 2009. Within the Comprehensive Immigration Reform package, the
provisions to give students a path to residency are perceived as the least contentious. But many opponents of
the act still view it as nothing but a first step in granting amnesty to illegal aliens.
Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, says part of the opposition is
focused on the fact that the proposed law might benefit more than the young adults who came to this country
as children.
Camarota, who favors stronger immigration laws, says there is also the fundamental question of fairness to
those who come to the U.S. legally to study.
"To some, it strikes them as unfair that illegals will get this subsidy when they shouldn't be here in the first
place," he said.
Felipe says making his undocumented status public and walking to D.C. was not a question but an imperative.
"We could either sit and be quiet in Miami and wait for them to come and get us or we could raise up our voice
so that the abuses can stop."
As the foursome crossed into North Carolina last weekend, their determination was fueled by the people they
met along the way.
"We set out not only to change the hearts and minds but also to motivate our peers and other undocumented
people to come out and not to be afraid anymore," Felipe says. "But something funny happened. They
motivate us more than we motivate them."
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/03/22/dream.act.education/?hpt=Sbin
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Notes on Research Topics:
Although students may have a wide variety of levels of prior knowledge, I based
these topics on my own students, who have professed to know almost nothing about many
of the current events/history topics presented in the novel. I believe that if the
research is conducted in small groups, and then presented to the class as a jigsaw, the
students will absorb much more than they would by simply transcribing lecture or power
point notes.
I developed the list of recommended websites because some of these topics can
be very sensitive. If students type “illegal immigration” or “Islam” into a search engine
such as Google, they can easily pull up hate websites that are full of propaganda and
racist language that are geared towards white supremacists. While it may be important
for students to know that these racist groups exist, the teacher will need to do a lot of
monitoring to make sure that this “information” does not find its way into the students’
presentations.
I also urge teachers to conduct a focus lesson regarding appropriate sources, and
using citations. This may be the perfect opportunity to utilize your school librarian for
some extra support. I believe that teachers and students could also develop their own
related research topics dealing with other issues raised by the novel or the news articles.
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - RESEARCH TOPICS
Directions - These topics all require significant amounts of research on the internet.
Websites that are listed may change, and there will certainly be new information on
these topics that emerges. The projects could take the form of a poster or a power
point. Each subtopic is designed to become one slide in a power point, but the students
could easily add other slides if they discover information which they believe to be
pertinent to the overall topic.
1) Research President Obama’s beliefs about immigration, and immigration reform.
+ What does his administration want to change?
+ How do they plan on accomplishing these changes?
+ How would these changes affect families like Nadira’s.
+ Do you agree with these changes?
+ What would you do differently if you were creating a new immigration policy?
(Utilize articles from your local newspaper, as well as the administration’s own stated
policy on their website.)
2) What are your US Congressmen or Senators beliefs about immigration?
+ Contact local office, and ask them to send you information about their
immigration related beliefs.
+ See if your elected official or a member of their staff will come speak to your
class or school about immigration policy.
+ Write him or her a letter about changes you think should be made to current US
immigration policy.
(Although this topic is not in the form of a power point, the students could use the same
sub topics that are listed in topic #1)
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - RESEARCH TOPICS CONTINUED
3) Research the treatment of Muslims in the US after the September 11th terrorist
attacks.
+ Try to find stories of specific Muslims, or people who were believed to be Muslim
who were mistreated after September 11th.
+ Use your local newspaper’s website to research if any Muslims in your areas had
negative experiences after September 11th.
+ Has the treatment of Muslims improved in the last nine years?
4) Research the US government program which asked all men from certain Muslim
countries to register with the US government.
+ Did this program help find terrorists?
+ How were those men and their families affected?
+ Did this policy make the US more safe, or less safe?
+ Do you think this program was racist, or otherwise unfair? WHY?
+ Why do you think the US chose to disband the program?
5) Research what services exist to help immigrants in your area.
+ List at least 5 different organizations in your area that assist immigrants.
(consider making a slide for each group)
+ What services do they provide?
+ What groups of people do they deal with?
+ How do they get resources ($ etc…) to help people?
+ How long have they been working/why did they start?
(Consider having a representative from one of these organizations come to speak to your
class about their work in the community. If the organization accepts student volunteers,
try to set up a field trip/service project with the organization. Find out what other sorts
of assistance they need (donations of canned food, winter coats etc…))
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - RESEARCH TOPICS CONTINUED
6) Research the country of Bangladesh
+ Describe the history of the Bengal people before the British arrived
+ Describe how the Bengals were treated under British rule
+ Describe the violence that occurred between Muslims and Hindu during the
Partition
+ Describe current conditions in the country of Bangladesh
+ How is Bangladesh being affected by global warming?
+ How many Bengalis currently live in other countries like the US? Why did they
choose to leave their homeland?
7) Research the religion of Islam
+ Who is the prophet Mohammed, and why is he so important?
+ What are the 5 pillars of the Muslim faith?
+ What common origins does Islam have with Judaism and Christianity?
+ How many Muslims currently live in the world? What countries do they live in?
+ What are some basic beliefs of the Islamic faith?
+ How many Muslims live in the United States?
8) Research the stories of children whose parents have been deported
+ Place the stories of at least 5 separate families on separate slides.
+ Research why the parent were deported.
+ Research how the family is dealing with the separation.
+ If available, how does the family feel about immigration policy in the United
States?
+ Research each family’s plans for the future.
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - RESEARCH TOPICS CONTINUED
9) Research the case of Elvira Arellano
+ Why was she going to be deported?
+ What actions did she take? WHY?
+ Why did the church decide to accept her?
+ What is the concept of “sanctuary”?
+ How was she finally arrested/deported?
+ What are her beliefs about current US immigration policy?
+ What is happening to her and her son now?
+ What are her plans/hopes for the future?
10) Research the stories of young people in high school who are living (or were living)
in the US illegally.
+ Research five young people, and answer the following questions for each of them:
+ Was it their choice to move to the US? If not, who made the choice and why?
+ How does being an illegal immigrant affect their daily lives?
+ How is being an illegal immigrant affecting their future plans?
+ How do they think US immigration policy should be changed?
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS – RESEARCH WEBSITES
http://www.nyla.org/index.php?page_id=183 (list of many immigration related websites
from the New York Public Library)
www.chicagotribune.com (for articles related to all topics)
www.nytimes.com
(for articles related to all topics)
www.npr.org
(for articles related to all topics)
www.pbs.org
(for articles related to all topics)
www.newsweek.com
(for articles related to all topics)
www.chicagosuntimes.com
(for articles related to all topics)
www.migrationinformation.org
(articles related to immigration)
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/immigration
(for information related to President Obama’s immigration reform plans and policy)
www.wsj.com
(for articles related to all topics)
www.washingtonpost.com (for articles related to all topics)
www.whitehouse.gov/issues/Immigration
(for information related to President Obama’s immigration reform plans and policy)
www.cair.com (for information related to the Islamic religion and treatment of Muslims
in the United States)
www.cairchicago.org (for information related to the Islamic religion and treatment of
Muslims in the United States)
asnic.utexas.edu/asnic/countries/bangla/bangladeshm.html (for information about
Bangladesh)
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/bangladesh/history (for information about Bangladesh)
www.time.com (for information about Elvira Arellano)
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ORGANIZATIONS THAT ASSIST IMMIGRANTS:
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
www.afsc.org
Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring
afscilemp@igc.apc.org
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS)
www.lirs.org
Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF)
www.maldef.org
Migration and Refugee Services, National Conference of Catholic Bishops (MRS)
www.nccbuscc.org
National Council of La Raza
www.nclr.org
National Immigration Forum
www.immigrationforum.org
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR)
www.nnirr.org
Television Race Initiative
www.pbs.org/pov/tvraceinitiative
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
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ASK ME NO QUESTIONS - PRESENTATIONS
Name_______________________
Topic: _____________________________________________________________
Presenter Names: ____________________________________________________
Three facts you learned: _______________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question: __________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Topic: _____________________________________________________________
Presenter Names: ____________________________________________________
Three facts you learned: _______________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question: __________________________________________________________
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Topic: _____________________________________________________________
Presenter Names: ____________________________________________________
Three facts you learned: _______________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question: __________________________________________________________
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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Ask Me No Questions - Research Power Point Rubric
Name________________________________
CATEGORY
Text - Font
Choice &
Formatting
4
3
2
1
Font formats (e.g.,
color, bold, italic) have
been carefully planned
to enhance readability
and content.
Font formats have
been carefully
planned to
enhance
readability.
Font formatting
has is difficult to
read. Too many
words are included
per slide.
Font formatting
makes it very difficult
to read the material.
Presentation
You speak clearly to
your audience, and
paraphrase your ppt.
without reading it
directly. You answer all
questions accurately.
You speak to your
audience. You
read directly from
your ppt. 1-2 times.
You do not know
the answer to 1 -2
questions.
You read directly
from your ppt. You
do not know the
answer to 3-4
questions.
Your presentation is
inaudible. You do not
know the answers to
audience questions.
Content –
Accuracy
All content throughout
the presentation is
accurate. There are no
factual errors.
1 - 2 pieces of
information are
inaccurate.
3 - 4 pieces of
information are
inaccurate.
Content is typically
confusing or contains
more than 4 factual
errors.
Sequencing
of
Information
Information is organized
in a clear, logical way.
Every slide has a title,
and the information on
the slide is in the correct
category.
Most information is
organized in a
clear, logical way.
One item of
information or title
is out of place.
Some information
is logically
sequenced. 2 -3
pieces of
information or titles
are out of place.
There is no clear plan
for the organization of
information.
Sources
You included 4-5
sources. Sources
were clearly cited,
and appropriate
source guidelines
were followed.
You included 2-3
sources. One
source was not
cited, or the cite
did not follow
source guidelines
You included 1
source. Your
sources were not
cited, or you did
not follow source
guidelines.
Your sources were
not cited and you did
not follow source
guidelines.
Content –
Inclusion
All content is present
including facts,
diagrams and pictures.
1 piece of content
is missing
2 – 3 pieces of
content are
missing
More than 3 pieces of
content are missing.
COMMENTS:
_________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
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Tondelli - Immigration Power Point Reflection
Name___________________
1) Why did you choose this topic? _____________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
2) What did you WANT to learn about this topic before you got started? ______
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
3) What was something surprising that you learned? _______________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
4) How has this entire project (contacting public officials, reading Ask Me No Questions,
researching this ppt, and volunteering) changed how you view immigrants?
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
5) What else would you like to learn about immigration?
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
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Notes on Immigrant Interview: In my continuing quest to have students interact and get
to know actual immigrants I added an immigrant interview for extra credit. I offered
this assignment after we finished reading Ask Me No Questions so students could
compare and contrast experiences. Even though many of my students immigrated when
they were very young, or are the children of immigrants, they may not know many of the
details of their family’s early experiences in the U.S. One of my students shared that she
did not know that she and her whole family were detained by the INS when she was six
years old. Her dad was eventually deported, and she has not seen him since then. If you
have ESL classes at your school, it may also be possible to pair up your students with
students in ESL classes for a mutually enriching interview experience.
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INTERVIEW AN IMMIGRANT:
EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT
DIRECTIONS: One of the best ways to learn about immigration in America is to talk to
someone who was born in a different country, and then immigrated here.
STEP 1: Find a person who immigrated to America, and ask them if you can interview
them.
STEP 2: Choose 10 – 15 questions to ask them related to their immigration experience.
Consider breaking your interview into 3 parts:
 Conditions in their home country/why they wanted to come to the
U.S.
 First experiences in America/surprises/learning the language/finding
a job etc…
 NOW – Expectations versus reality
STEP 3: Choose 10 of the following questions, and create 5 – 10 of your own.
1) How old were you when you immigrated to the U.S.?
2) What were some of the reasons you/your family decided to immigrate?
3) What are some of your favorite memories of your birth country?
4) Describe the journey from your home country to the U.S.
5) How did you prepare to come to the U.S.?
6) Did you speak any English before you came to the U.S.? If not, did you decide
to learn English?
7) If you did not learn English, why not? Do you think life is harder in the U.S.
without speaking English? Explain.
8) When you first came to America, how did you think it would be?
9) How was America different than what you expected?
10) If you had relatives already living in the U.S., did the help you? How?
11) Do you still stay in contact with or visit your home country? HOW? WHY?
12) If you could choose, would you come to the U.S. again? Why or why not?
13) What has been the best part of your immigration experience?
14) What has been the most frustrating/disappointing part of your experience?
15) What do you wish you would have known before you came?
16) If you are undocumented, how has that made life in the U.S. more difficult?
STEP 4: Type your interview and present it to the class
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NAME OF PERSON BEING INTERVIEWED: ________________________________
AGE: _____________________________________________________________
COUNTRY OF BIRTH: ________________________________________________
JOB: _____________________________________________________________
Conditions in their home country/why they wanted to come to the U.S.
Question 1: _________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 2: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 3: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 4: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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First experiences in America/surprises/learning the language/finding a job
Question 1: _________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 2: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 3: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 4: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 5: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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NOW – Expectations versus reality
Question 1: _________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 2: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 3: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 4: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Question 5: ________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Answer: ___________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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REFLECTION: What did you learn about immigration from this interview?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Compare the experience of the immigrant you interviewed with Nadira’s
family in Ask Me No Questions
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Immigration Interview Rubric (to be completed by teacher)
Student Name:
________________________________________________
30 points
20 points
10 points
5- 0 points
Preparation
(50 points)
Before the interview,
the student prepared
several in-depth
AND factual
questions to ask.
At Least 10
questions
Before the interview,
the student prepared
a couple of in-depth
questions and
several factual
questions to ask.
At Least 5
questions
Before the interview,
the student prepared
several factual
questions to ask.
At least 3
questions
The student did not
prepare any
questions before the
interview.
2 questions or less
Labeling
(50 points)
The student put the
date of the interview,
place of the
interview, full name
of the person being
interviewed and had
an introduction to the
interview.
The student included
the full name of the
person being
interviewed and an
introduction to the
interview,
The student included
the date of the
interview and full
name of the person
being interviewed on
the report. No
introduction
The student forgot to
put the date of the
interview OR the full
name of the person
being interviewed on
the report. And no
introduction.
Formatting &
editing
(50 points)
The student edited,
organized and typed
the interview in a
way that made the
information clear and
interesting.
The student edited,
organized and typed
the interview in a
way that made the
information clear.
The student edited, The student did NOT
organized and typed edit, organize or type
the interview but the the interview.
information was not
as clear or as
interesting as it could
have been.
Reflection
(50 points)
The reflection is well
organized, connects
what they learned to
Ask Me No
Questions, and
demonstrates a
growing
understanding of
issues related to
immigration
The reflection is well
organized and
connects what they
learned to Ask Me
No Questions.
The reflection offers
few connections to
AMNQ and
demonstrates 1 – 2
points of emerging
knowledge
The reflection is
lacking facts and
quotations from the
interview OR the
quotes and facts are
not accurately
reported.
Knowledge
gained
Report to class
(50 points)
Student can
accurately answer
several questions
about the person
who was interviewed
and can tell how this
interview relates to
the material being
studied in class.
Student can
accurately answer a
few questions about
the person who was
interviewed and can
tell how this
interview relates to
the material being
studied in class.
Student can
accurately answer a
few questions about
the person who was
interviewed.
Student cannot
accurately answer
questions about the
person who was
interviewed.
CATEGORY
Total
Notes: __________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
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SUPPLEMENTARY
ACTIVITIES
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Notes on Movies:
95% of the movies dealing with illegal immigration focus on the US/Mexican
border. I have included several of these movies (Sin Nombre, El Norte, Bread & Roses)
because they provide the chance to compare and contrast those immigration experiences
with Nadira’s. Several common themes emerge such as trying to remain invisible, feeling
like an outsider, and the complicated relationships that exist in families where people
have different immigration statuses, or when one person is apprehended and others are
not. The movie The Visitor is the only movie I have found that directly deals with the
post September 11th treatment of men from Muslim countries in the United States. I also
included the movie Real Women Have Curves because it deals with the themes of parents
trying to enforce the rules/traditions of their former country on their daughter, who is
very American. There are also a number of documentaries related to the topic of
immigration which I did not include. Again, I would encourage teachers to contact their
school or local librarian for help locating cinematic resources. Several of these movies
are rated R, and Sin Nombre and Maria Full of Grace both contain particularly graphic
violence. For these reasons, I would recommend that teachers select clips from these
movies.
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IMMIGRATION RELATED MOVIES
Sin Nombre – R Two teenagers attempt to cross Mexico by hoping on top of freight
trains on an extremely dangerous trip to the US. They face many dangers including gang members who try
to rape, rob, and kill immigrants, hunger and thirst, corrupt police, and the train itself, which crushes and
decapitates riders daily.
Bread and Roses (2000) – R – Immigrants who clean an office building in Los Angeles
risk losing their job and being deported when they try to fight for their rights.
El Norte - Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala
and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.
Although the movie is 30 years old, many of the issues remain, including the grueling journey across Mexico,
the horrible conditions in border towns such as Tijuana, the risks of using human smugglers, and the
constant fear of being caught and deported once in the US.
Maria Full of Grace (2004) - R
Desperate for money, a pregnant Colombian teenager agrees to become a drug mule and travel to the New
York.
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The Visitor PG 13 – (2008) The Visitor is the story of a professor who discovers a
couple living illegally in his apartment and in the United States. They become friends, and everything is
going well until the young man, a Syrian, is arrested for being a male from a Muslim country after
September 11th.
In America (2002) Is the story of a young Irish family living illegally in the US who make
friends with an African artist who is also an immigrant.
FARMINGVILLE is a documentary about a small town in Long Island that recently had a
large number of Mexican immigrants move to town. There are normal ups and downs until two of the
Mexican men are murdered, possibly the victims of a hate crime against Mexican immigrants.
The New Americans is a 7 hour documentary from PBS which follows the stories of
four sets of new immigrants to the US of a four year period. The immigrants all come from very different
economic, educational and geographical backgrounds, and settle in different parts of the United States.
There are extensive resources on PBS.org that go along with this movie, and deal with the topic of
immigration.
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La Ciudad/The City Is a series of four short stories (about ½ hour each) of
different Hispanic immigrants in New York City. Although the film is shot in black and white, it is set in the
present. Each of the stories is a gripping tale of people who are just barely surviving against incredible
odds. Each of the stories does not have an ending, which is the perfect way to spark a class discussion, or
have students write their own ending to one of the vignettes.
Under the Same Moon – Is the story of a grade school aged boy who decides to
come to America by himself to find his mother. Although this is a trip that tens of thousands of children
attempt every year, it is still extremely dangerous. Many people have said that this movie is too simplistic,
and tries to sugar coat some of the more horrific aspects of the crossing.
A made for TV movie coming out in 2010 on the Lifetime TV channel. Enrique’s journey is
the harrowing true story of a young Central American attempting to find his mother in
the US, and crossing Mexico multiple times on the top of trains. He is beaten, robbed,
addicted to sniffing glue, and feels abandoned by his mother while he leaves his own
girlfriend at home pregnant with his child. The book and the original news article written
by Sonia Nazarro for the Los Angeles times are also wonderful.
THE MUSLIM AMERICANS is one episode of a PBS series called America at a
Crossroads, which explored many aspects of American interactions with the global Muslim world.
This episode focuses on Muslims living in the United States, especially their experiences after
September 11th, and the similar and unique challenges faced by Muslim teenagers.
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Ask Me No Questions
Name_______________________________________________
Across
3. - Aisha's teacher
5. - younger sister and narrator
7. - family attempts to immigrate here
8. - Nadira and Aisha's mother
10. - Position Aisha may win
12. - Canadian U Aisha may attend
13. - the families immigration lawyer
15. - mentor and religious leader
16. - perfect and smart older sister
Down
1. - where the family keeps their savings
2. - college Aisha has an interview at
4. - town the family live in
6. - the rebellious cousin
9. - country that the family is from
11. - local Bengali bad boy
14. - Taslima's white boyfriend
15. - father making difficult choices
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Ask Me No Questions Vocabulary
Name___________________
L
V
S
S
I
S
C
Y
O
Q
D
D
J
X
S
E
L
A
R
E
H
L
B
P
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P
E
X
J
K
Z
C
V
L
A
H
L
W
L
M
O
R
R
U
E
H
S
N
R
E
U
S
E
O
P
X
E
G
R
P
R
O
R
A
R
D
V
I
A
C
U
D
N
I
T
R
E
O
T
N
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I
R
V
G
S
L
I
S
I
D
A
I
L
H
E
D
C
N
A
N
I
G
D
C
W
N
V
S
I
I
T
A
T
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L
W
G
I
A
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A
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E
Z
G
R
N
Z
O
Y
E
A
C
L
O
D
V
I
N
A
A
A
U
U
R
B
L
T
D
L
P
N
E
H
O
R
N
E
O
Q
I
F
I
J
P
G
Z
C
R
B
U
Q
S
E
C
I
A
O
A
D
E
T
A
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P
S
A
X
E
G
P
N
N
Q
U
A
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C
I
M
I
M
G
H
S
I
P
E
E
H
S
G
I
D
D
Y
B
Write your vocabulary word next to the clue:
Confused________________
Burned__________________
Frustrated_______________
Yell at__________________
Legal area_______________
Fight____________________
Embarrassed_____________
Change_________________
Yell out___________________
Expression_________________
Losing energy ______________
Troublemakers_____________
Give gifts _________________
Hungry ___________________
Disbelief__________________
Bold ___________________
Sloppy _________________
Happy __________________
Put in danger ____________
Copy ___________________
Frown __________________
Top student _____________
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NEWS
ARTICLES
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Article #1- Muslims Fear Fellow New Yorkers' Revenge
By S. Mitra Kalita and Carol Eisenberg
September 12, 2001
Amina Zaid huddled yesterday inside a Muslim book store on Atlantic Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, waiting for her
husband to pick her up.
Wearing a navy blue hejjab, the traditional headcovering of Muslim women, the 54-year-old mother of nine said she had
been called an obscene name moments before walking into the shop.
"I don't care to repeat it," she said to a reporter. "The ignorance that dwells within the minds of people, I can't account for."
Like many Muslims interviewed in neighborhoods all over New York City yesterday, Zaid said her heart went out to the
victims of yesterday's terrorist attacks as well as to their families - but she also voiced enormous fear of retaliation against
herself and her family, and the thousands of Muslims who call New York their home.
"I want to get out of here before night falls," she said, motioning to Atlantic Avenue, which is lined with shops, restaurants
and other stores owned by Muslims. "I don't want to be caught in it."
Indeed, like their fellow New Yorkers, Muslims from downtown Brooklyn to Jackson Heights, Queens, expressed shock and
sorrow about yesterday's tragedy. But many urged Americans not to assume that Muslims were behind the attack.
"Whoever is responsible is not a group to be considered sane," said Ali Mirza of the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center in
Queens and president of Americans of Pakistani Heritage.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Islamic advocacy group, called on Muslims to offer help to
the victims of yesterday's attacks. It also urged those who wear Islamic attire to consider staying out of public areas for a
while.
Anecdotes from around the city suggested that the fears of Muslim New Yorkers might be well-founded.
"Let me just tell you this, there ain't an Arab in NYC that's safe," said Anthony Lanza, a carpenter standing on Mulberry
Street yesterday, who said he hadn't heard from his brother-in-law who worked on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center.
A woman passing by nodded her head. "Don't you think they [the Arabs] should get blown away?"
But Muslims said such stereotypes are mistaken. "Islam doesn't say, 'Kill innocent people,'" said Ahmad Osman, 40, of
Sunnyside, part-owner of a Middle Eastern deli in Astoria. "Islam says to be peaceful, to be good to people."
Fearing retaliatory violence, many Muslim small- business owners shuttered their shops yesterday. And some who took their
chances paid a price.
A boy standing in front of Yemen Cafe, who identified himself as the owner's son, said a group of teenagers threw bottles at
the restaurant. "They were calling us '-- Arab terrorists,'" he said.
More than a few Muslims expressed anger at the terrorists who have made their lives more difficult.
"Of course, I look bad [because of what they do]," said Nourdine Bahri, who emigrated from Algeria 10 years ago and is the
owner of a grocery and housewares store in Astoria. "I come to this country to work. Why am I going to bother this country?"
Bahri noted the irony that today, his brother in Algeria called him to find out whether he was all right. "Always, we call them
to find out if they are all right," Bahri said. "It's strange for them to call me."
Staff writers Halimah Abdullah, Katie Thomas and Tania Lopez contributed to this story.
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Article # 2 - 2 families keep faith while forced to defend it
By Aamer Madhani
September 20, 2001
NEW YORK
Sitting on a richly patterned Oriental rug beside a mound of 14,000 hard, white beans, Talat Hamdani tirelessly scooped up
handfuls of the dried legumes and slowly dropped them, bean by bean, into an overflowing cereal bowl as she silently prayed
one of the 99 names for Allah.
The eldest of her three sons, M. Salman Hamdani, 23, was on his way from the family home in Queens to his job as a lab
technician in Manhattan on Sept. 11. According to the family, police believe that when Hamdani, a trained emergency
medical technician, heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center, he rushed there to help.
Like more than 5,000 others, Hamdani has yet to return home.
"This is what is holding me," said his still-hopeful mother, nodding at the beans used to help count her prayers. "I lean on my
faith."
A few miles away on Roosevelt Island, a narrow isle in the East River between Queens and Manhattan, Tahira Khan also
waits for her son.
A commodities trader for Carr Futures, Taimour Khan, 29, was last seen in his 92nd-floor office at One World Trade Center,
the first of the 110-story twin towers hit by hijacked passenger planes.
Standing along the river, a spray of flowers clasped to her chest, Tahira Khan joined family and friends Tuesday night at a
candlelight vigil for Taimour's return. "I know he's coming home," said Khan, with tears in her eyes. "I cry, not because I'm
afraid, but for God's compassion."
Neither Hamdani nor Khan, both Pakistani-born Americans, would allow anyone to speak of their missing sons in the past
tense.
And for both women, the anguish over their lost loved ones is compounded by increasing reports of violence against fellow
Muslims in the United States. The Hamdani and Khan families condemn the attacks on the trade center as despicable acts of
terrorism that have unfairly tarnished the religion that sustains them.
800 Muslims victims
The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington estimates that as many as 800 of the victims at the World Trade
Center site were of Muslim faith.
For the Hamdanis and the Khans, the most immediate concern is the fast-fading chance that their children are still alive.
In the living room of the family's modest white frame house in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, Talat Hamdani, a
middle school English teacher, sat alone in a corner, fingering her beans. Propped nearby, an old junior high school picture of
her missing son, Salman, overlooked a room dominated by a wide-screen television tuned to CNN. At the other end of the
living room, her husband, Salim, owner of a convenience store, sat with other relatives intently watching the news.
"I have family that has been coming from London, from California, Kuwait," said Talat, sitting on the floor in a blue and
white embroidered shalwar kameez, a traditional tunic worn with loose-fitting trousers.
"I don't know why they are coming. They think he's gone. Do you think he's gone?" she asked a visitor plaintively.
Article 2.1
Fan of `Star Wars'
Salman Hamdani was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and came to the United States when he was 1 year old. A "Star Wars" fan,
he even got a vanity plate, "YungJedi," for his new, navy blue Honda Accord.
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His mother said Salman was studying part time for a master's degree at New York University. He already had a bachelor's
degree from Queens College.
While he still lived at home with his parents and two younger brothers, Salman Hamdani planned eventually to move to
Manhattan, his mother said, noting that he was obsessed with the fast pace of the big city.
"He is an American," she said simply. "He likes reading science-fiction books and playing video games. He was on the
football team in high school."
`All-American' upbringing
American-born Taimour Khan also played football at his high school in the upscale Long Island suburb of Woodbury. There,
his family of secular Muslims said, he had an "All-American" upbringing.
In fact, Taimour was the captain of the football team and still holds the record for the longest punt return in his school's
conference. At the State University of New York in Albany, he majored in economics and joined a fraternity.
Taimour's mother, aunt and uncle raised him and his younger sister, Zara, along with two cousins, who were more like
brothers. Growing up, Taimour's friends reflected a variety of races, religions and ethnicity.
In the Khans' Long Island neighborhood, they were the only Pakistanis, but they thought nothing of it, according to Shaan
and Salman Khan, the two cousins who grew up in the same house with Taimour.
Described by his family as handsome and charismatic, Taimour was enjoying life as a young, single man with the means to
live a comfortable Manhattan lifestyle. He was a fixture in the downtown club scene and had a social calendar that would
take a marathoner's stamina to maintain, said his uncle, Arshad Khan.
While Taimour hardly was observant of Islam, he did identify himself as Muslim and he connected to the religion's emphasis
on family. While he had a long list of good friends, he was closest to his cousins Shaan and Salman. The family said he doted
on his mother.
"Nearly every week, he would come by to see his mother," his uncle Arshad said. "He would never let her cook. He would
always take her to the best restaurants."
In turn, Tahira Khan, a slim woman who dresses in chic, Western clothes, doted on her only son.
What has confounded, hurt and frightened the Hamdani and Khan families amid their personal grief is the growing number of
reported cases of intimidation, harassment and violence against Muslims and those who appear to be Muslim.
Not a reflection on Islam
"For the action of a handful of fanatics to reflect on all people of Muslim faith is insane," Shaan Khan said. "No one would
say the actions of Timothy McVeigh reflect all of Christianity."
While praying for his older brother's safe return, Mohammed Hamdani, 19, said he has been forced to deal with mistreatment
of Muslim students at State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is president of the Muslim Student
Association.
"I'm an American, and I've been victimized directly with my brother," he said. "Now I'm being victimized by my own
[American] people."
Inshallah, which translates to "God willing," is an Arabic word that constantly has been repeated in the Hamdani and Khan
homes in the days since the attacks.
If God is willing, the families believe, both Salman and Taimour will be coming home soon.
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
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Article # 3 -Determining if crime is hate-based is no easy task
By Beth Shuster
October 11, 2001
Despite near-daily reports of attacks against people who appear Middle Eastern, the difficulty in determining
what motivated the criminals and the nation's imprecise system for tracking hate crimes make it impossible to
know how dramatically such violence has surged.
Since Sept. 11, the FBI has opened investigations into 145 reported hate crimes, the Muslim Public Affairs
Council of Southern California has reported 800 cases nationwide, and the LAPD reported 32 in Los Angeles
alone.
But the FBI, for example, opens an investigation when agents receive reports of suspected hate crimes. It does not
mean that the FBI has determined that all are hate crimes or that all are being actively investigated. Locally, the
situation is equally murky.
Whatever the number, there is no doubt that many people have been victimized over these anxious weeks and that
many have suffered because of their ethnicity or their appearance. But determining whether these cases are
motivated by hate is difficult because it requires exploring a gray area of criminal justice: intent.
Did the killer of an Egyptian grocer in San Gabriel, Calif., have an ethnic bias against Egyptians, or was the
killing an interrupted armed robbery that turned into a murder? Was a Muslim woman nearly driven off a road in
Florida because of her ethnicity, or was it a case of road rage? Were the windows of a service station in Michigan
shot out because its owners are Arab Americans or because it was a good target for a shooting spree?
Judging intent is difficult
Beyond proving what was in the mind of the criminal, the definition of a hate crime varies from state to state.
Some local law enforcement agencies collect the data, others don't. And many of the crimes go unreported by
victims afraid to share the facts with police.
In addition, some skeptics suggest that advocacy groups inflate hate crime statistics to drum up support for their
causes.
Meanwhile, the tracking systems for cases that are filed are similarly flawed.
Law enforcement agencies are not required to report hate crimes to the federal government. Yet the FBI issues an
annual crime report listing hate crimes. So when the FBI announced in 1999, for example, that there were 7,876
bias-motivated crimes, that did not reflect all the law enforcement agencies in the country.
When California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced Sept. 19 that his office is investigating 70 possible
hate crimes, he meant that some major police departments in the state are looking at that many cases. When City
Attorney Rocky Delgadillo announced that his office received 37 reports of hate crimes, his office in fact got the
number from a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman who later said the department is unsure how many of
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those were truly hate-motivated.
"To be perfectly honest, as ugly as these things are, I don't know if law enforcement has an accurate and true
picture of these crimes," said Special Agent Chris Davis, the hate crimes coordinator for the FBI's Los Angeles
region.
Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, agreed.
"The truth is, hate crime statistics are so fouled up ... there's never going to be a way to define it," said Potok,
whose organization is tracking reports of hate crimes since the terrorist attacks. "You simply cannot tell whether
hate crimes are going up or down."
A research group affiliated with the Southern Poverty Law Center compiled a list of 134 reported hate incidents
from around the country on the Web site www.tolerance.org. It lists two homicides, along with vandalism, verbal
threats and some assaults -- all since Sept. 11, when terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center,
one into the Pentagon and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania.
The passage of the first hate crime laws came partly in response to the 1986 murder of Michael Griffith, a 23year-old black man who was beaten to death in the New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach. Griffith was
killed while trying to escape a mob of white teen-agers wielding baseball bats and shouting racial epithets. Since
then, hate crime has become an established -- if much debated -- branch of criminal law.
In California, a pioneering state in enacting hate crime laws, any illegal act motivated by race, religion, sexual
orientation or physical or mental disability is considered a hate crime. Enacted in 1987, the laws generally tack on
prison time to those convicted of other offenses in cases where prosecutors show that hate motivated the act.
Thirteen states include crimes motivated by gender as hate offenses.
Hate crime really is seen as two crimes. There is the underlying offense, the assault or vandalism or threat. And
there is the motivation of hatred of a particular type of person that draws an extra punishment.
Article 3.1
Sometimes hatred is apparent
Some recent incidents seem to clearly fit the definition of a hate crime. An Iraqi grocery store owner in San
Francisco found "Terrorist Go Home" scrawled in black marker on his storefront. A Sikh gas station owner in
Mesa, Ariz., was killed, allegedly by a pickup truck driver who shouted, "I stand for America all the way" as he
was apprehended. In Tacoma, Wash., vandals spray-painted, "Zionism + U.S. = 5,000 dead" in a synagogue
parking lot.
Mosques have been burned, Arab Americans have reported receiving threatening e-mails on their personal
computers, and a Pakistani restaurant was set on fire in Salt Lake City.
But most of the alleged hate offenses that have been reported throughout the United States in the month since the
terrorist attacks may be hard to prove. That's one reason hate-crime conviction rates typically are low, officials
say.
Another reason, according to Michael Gennaco, formerly the head of the hate crimes unit in the U.S. attorney's
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office in Los Angeles, is that many state prosecutors find the cases complex and difficult to prove.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Capt. Frank Merriman is overseeing the murder investigation of Adel
Karas, the Egyptian grocer in San Gabriel. Investigators have not determined what was behind that killing, but he
warned that most such cases turn out not to be ethnically motivated.
"We have very, very few hate-related murders. Absolutely few," he said. "I can think of maybe a couple in the last
few years."
And from an investigative standpoint, Merriman said, "It's really inconsequential unless it helps us solve the case
in some way."
A fire at an Afghan restaurant in Encino, which drew headlines following the attacks, was determined to be arson,
but city fire officials said they do not consider it a hate crime.
Although Merriman downplayed the importance of racial motive in investigating a case, others argue that it does
have significance, if only in persuading authorities to pay more attention to an incident that otherwise might be
swept under the rug.
In the Karas case, for example, the FBI, the sheriff's homicide bureau and the sheriff's hate crimes unit are
investigating the killing -- far more attention than most homicides in Los Angeles receive.
Karas' family and others in the Coptic Christian community alerted the FBI to the case, and they are grateful for
the increased attention. Family members particularly suspect a racial motive because they say no money was
taken from the cash register.
"It is certainly reassuring to know that not only the local police are involved," said Basem Wasef, Karas' nephew.
"We've never been involved with anything like this before. ... It's nice to know we have the FBI and the [deputy]
sheriffs looking into it."
Still, community and activist groups say not all these cases receive the law enforcement attention they deserve.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, for example, insists that last week's killing of Abdullah Mohammed
Nimer in South Central Los Angeles was a hate crime. But the LAPD believes otherwise; Det. Bill Fallon said
Nimer's ethnicity was "totally unrelated" to his murder.
"We are treating this as a simple robbery," Fallon said.
Until the cases are solved -- and sometimes even then -- the motives of the criminals will not be known.
Convenience stores, service stations, restaurants and small markets make tempting targets for property and violent
crime even in more placid times.
Criminals' words may show motive
But some who study hate crimes and some law enforcement leaders said they have little doubt that hate will prove
the motivating force behind many of the recent acts of violence.
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"There are several indicators used by police departments and the FBI to establish if an offense is hate-motivated
and often it is the words of the perpetrators," said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center of Violence and
Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston. "In many of these crimes, the perpetrators speak with their actions
rather than their words. ... My guess is that most of these are hate crimes."
Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks agreed.
"The type of hate crime is a concern," Parks said. "Our top three hate crimes historically [have] been race, religion
and [sexual] orientation. Almost exclusively since the 11th, it's been nationality and culture and hate incidents
where people are acting out against someone who they think is Middle Eastern."
Regardless of what percentage of the current rash of crimes against Middle Easterners turns out to be ethnically
motivated, proponents of hate crime laws argue that their importance is less statistical than psychological. In that
sense, the crimes are analogous to terrorism itself.
"Terrorists send a message, hate mongers send a message," Levin said. "The numbers are small, but it only takes a
small number to make life miserable for a large number of people."
As Parks noted, the vandal who paints a swastika on a synagogue commits a relatively minor crime, an act of
vandalism. But the effect of that vandalism is far greater than forcing the temple to paint over a wall; it is to
terrorize a congregation, a community.
Nagwa Ibrahim, community outreach director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Southern California, said
many of the recent cases probably won't result in criminal charges, but they are nonetheless traumatizing.
In the end, activists and police agreed that they may never know what caused many of the crimes committed in
recent weeks. They suggested that more uniform laws and better reporting would help police, politicians and
community groups track hate crimes and respond to them.
In the meantime, the effort to establish a motive in as many of the recent cases as possible is worth it, they
argued--both for the comfort it provides the victims and the community and for the information it gives leaders.
"I think there's great importance to knowing," said Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Policymakers
need to know the size and shape of the problem in order to deal with it. Two years from now, scholars will be
looking back and they won't be able to quantify this in any meaningful way ... and that really is too bad."
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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Article # 4 -Loved ones of missing migrants face dilemma
By Evan Osnos
October 15, 2001
Long before he disappeared, Leobardo Lopez Pascual had learned to be invisible.
Like hundreds of other undocumented workers in and around the World Trade Center, the 41-year-old
cook at Windows on the World knew that staying in this country meant avoiding attention. He kept to
himself and worked hard, mailing a small check each week to his wife and four children in Mexico.
But when Lopez Pascual vanished among the thousands of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his
relatives, also here illegally, found themselves torn between the need for aid and information and the
fear of exposure to authorities.
"We are fearful because we gave information about ourselves. [But] we had to get answers," said
Gerardo Pascual, an uncle who decided to come forward along with Leobardo's brother in the hope of
retrieving his body.
Families and roommates in immigrant neighborhoods throughout New York face this dilemma as lives
of careful anonymity are overturned by a disaster that did not discriminate.
Hundreds of other undocumented dishwashers, delivery workers and bus staff from the trade center area
survived the attacks, only to find their employers' businesses destroyed or shuttered. Once paid in cash
or employed by firms now reluctant to confirm their use of illegal immigrants, these workers are
struggling to provide the documentation needed to receive disaster benefits available to displaced
workers.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has pledged not to pursue cases against illegal workers or
those who employ them based on information gathered as a result of the attacks. Yet many
undocumented residents are wary.
No one knows exactly how many undocumented immigrants were among the victims. Estimates by
community groups range from 40 to 100. But some of the same groups say the estimates are premature.
"The early figure on Haitian victims was five, and that seems outrageously low," said Merrie Archer,
associate director for programs and development at the New York-based National Coalition on Haitian
Rights. "Seeing the numbers for the Dominican community or the Puerto Rican community,
proportionally, it doesn't seem possible. . . . Haitians have the same types of jobs."
A count by Tepeyac Association, a nonprofit immigrants' group, found 10 Dominican victims. The city's
Haitian and Dominican populations are comparable in size -- 350,000 to 400,000, according to the 2000
census and community estimates.
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Relatives far away
Another impediment to an accurate count is that many of the city's undocumented workers live far from
close relatives. In those cases, getting personal information from relatives in poor or remote towns is
nearly impossible.
"It is so difficult to get any benefits for these people and we are afraid that it will take too long," said
Brother Joel Magallan, a Jesuit missionary and executive director of Tepeyac, now serving as a
clearinghouse for immigrants affected by the attacks.
Even late last week, the group was receiving new calls about victims. In one case, a 15-year-old girl
called Thursday from a pay phone in Guatemala City to provide a shred of new information about her
mother, who vanished Sept. 11.
Without much more than a name and age, however, Tepeyac has been unable to file a claim for benefits
on the girl's behalf.
That case is on top of 65 missing persons cases that Tepeyac has filed successfully.
The group has had measured success in getting disaster aid for undocumented families.
The state Crime Victims Board is providing lump-sum or partial payments up to $1,500 to victims'
families. The Red Cross is offering up to $30,000 to cover housing, food and other urgent costs,
regardless of a family's immigration status.
Proving that a family member is missing requires identification to establish a relationship, as well as
documents, such as a letter from an employer or an affidavit from witnesses, that confirms the person's
location on Sept 11. New York City and the state are offering free legal help to families struggling to
prove their case.
The challenge of substantiating a claim for benefits is even greater for undocumented workers now
unemployed as a result of the attacks.
Ineligible for insurance
Illegal immigrants are not eligible for unemployment insurance. They may apply for cash assistance
from the September 11th fund, managed jointly by the United Way and the New York Community
Trust, but each case is considered based on the evidence to support the claim.
"We are trying to be flexible but we just need to do it on a case-by-case basis," said Julie Goldscheid,
general counsel for Safe Horizon, the group helping administer the funds.
If workers lack a pay stub or other documents, they can prove employment with an affidavit from other
employees or a letter from their employer, Goldscheid said.
But even those documents are hard to gather, according to workers who fill Tepeyac's offices each day
in search of assistance.
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Jose Luis Reyes, a lanky 15-year-old, said he worked one block from the trade center as a dishwasher at
a Mexican restaurant closed since Sept. 11. He has no paperwork to prove his employment and has been
unable to find or reach the manager. With $230 due for rent next month, Reyes, who lives with four
others in an apartment in Harlem, said he may have no choice but to return to Mexico.
"I don't have any money to pay for food or transportation," he said.
Delfino Cielo, 28, had three years of seniority at a steakhouse that is now closed. A slumping job market
has made it difficult for him to get any job interviews, and the few he has found didn't work out because
he's undocumented, he said.
"Most of the restaurants, they ask for a Social Security number so I just walk away," said Cielo, who
lives in Queens with his girlfriend.
`Workers left behind'
"We are very concerned about displaced workers," said Dennis Diaz, lead organizer for the Hotel
Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union. "With all due respect to the [families of]
victims, there is a lot of money available to them, but there is not as much going to the workers left
behind."
In total, an estimated 11,900 restaurant jobs have been lost in New York since Sept. 11, according to an
analysis by the non-partisan Fiscal Policy Institute in Albany.
One of those out of work is Gerardo Pascual, Leobardo's uncle. The elder Pascual was a dishwasher at
the Windows restaurant, a job his nephew helped him get.
Trying not to dwell on his own family's mounting needs, Gerardo Pascual now holds the hope of finding
both a job and his nephew. His goal, in emerging from the shadows of the undocumented community, is
to secure a measure of comfort for his nephew's wife, Mirna.
"All I want is to find a body. That's all," he said.
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
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Article # 5 -A Troubling Year for Muslims in America
By Carol Eisenberg
September 2, 2002
Nothing could dampen his mood that day. As Sayed Tayyab Bokhari chopped onions alongside his wife on that
languorous Saturday last December, he thought that he had found happiness beyond anything he had ever dared
dream of in America. After three years in this country, his hard work had paid off: The slight, soft-spoken
Pakistani had worked his way up to a job as a manager for a chain of dollar stores. A few months earlier, he had
married a dark-haired American beauty whom he adored. And now, as they prepared to host their first dinner
party together, the newlyweds traded curry recipes and teased each other in their Brentwood kitchen.
“We were laughing and learning to make different dishes together — chicken biryani, mutton curry, fried
queema,” Bokhari recalled. “I told my wife, Tania, ‘This was the life I had always dreamed of.’” Perhaps because
he was so elated, he did not register the alarm in his older brother’s voice when they talked later that day on the
telephone. “There is somebody who wants to speak to you,” the brother said, speaking from Bokhari’s store in
Brentwood.
Who could want me on a Saturday evening? Bokhari wondered.
“The police,” his brother replied.
Assuming there had been another theft at the store — a not uncommon experience — Bokhari excused himself
from his company without undue concern. But when he pulled up in the parking lot a few minutes later, he was
surrounded by about a dozen men in suits, who identified themselves as agents of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Postal Service.
Like hundreds of Muslim and Arab immigrants picked up over the past year, Bokhari was arrested on visa
violations and interrogated about suspected ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. It didn’t seem to matter how
many times he denied knowing anything. “As a Muslim, you must support the Islamic jihad against the West,” he
recalled one agent pressing him. Bokhari replied that he had wept “watching the people falling from the floors” of
the towers. He told the agent that this was not jihad, but cold-blooded murder.
“You are scared now if you are Muslim, trust me, very much scared,” Bokhari said two weeks ago after his
release from jail on a $12,000 bond while he awaits a hearing on whether he can remain in this country. “Anyone
looks at me now, my heart starts pumping.”
This has been a deeply troubling year for Muslims in America — a time of bitter misunderstandings and often
stark extremes of experience. On one level, the government’s questioning and detention of hundreds of mostly
immigrant men in probes that many believe are based on religious and ethnic profiling have created a powerful
sense of siege. But there also have been other, less remarked-upon changes. In hundreds of mosques across the
country, there is reinvigorated debate about what Muslims believe and how they should live in a pluralistic
society. And, too, there have been unexpected moments of grace in encounters with people of other faiths. “When
I go to churches, synagogues and schools, folks are very warm, they’re very understanding and they’re very keen
to learn more about Islam,” said Dr. Faroque Khan, one of the founders of the Islamic Center of Long Island in
Westbury.
“But it’s at the government level we’re having big-time trouble. No one is criticizing the detention of people who
create problems. But when you pick up hundreds of people whose visas have expired and put them in prison for
six or seven months without representation, and they all have names like Mohammed or Sayed, and you know for
a fact that the gardener who works for you is undocumented, you begin to wonder what’s going on.”
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As the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center draws near, many Muslims say they are especially
uneasy. Fears of additional reprisals and a sense of betrayal on the part of the government complicate already
tangled emotions. And though government officials deny they are pursuing suspects based on religious or ethnic
profiling, few believe that.
“I don’t know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy
camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of
alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility,” wrote Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian who
teaches at Columbia University. His column appeared on iviews.com, a Web site of Islamic and Middle Eastern
news and opinion. And the ongoing drama of detentions and deportations has only intensified those feelings,
particularly since very few arrests have resulted in charges related to terror.
Though Bokhari was cleared of any ties to terrorism, for instance, he was imprisoned for eight months on charges
of having a fraudulent South African passport. He spent nearly three of those months in a 5-by-8-foot cell called
“The Hole,” at the maximum-security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where fluorescent lights shined
24 hours a day and cameras followed his every move.
“They put me in a place where they put extremely dangerous criminals,” he said. “And when I went there I
thought, ‘I’m in a grave.’ I said, ‘I’m claustrophobic.’ I told them, ‘It’s going to be very hard for me to survive
even for an hour or two. Please, for God’s sake, don’t leave me here.’ “All they said was, ‘We have orders from
the central office in Washington, D.C.’” Though he was released two weeks ago from an INS detention facility in
York, Pa., Bokhari remains frightened about what lies ahead. He lost his job and his rented home, and with a
conviction for passport fraud, he worries about whether he will be allowed to remain here. He denies that he
knowingly engaged in deception when he applied for and received a passport while working in South Africa in
the late 1990s, though his name and birth date appeared incorrectly. Justice Department officials did not return
calls about the case.
“The people of the U.S., they are very much innocent,” Bokhari said. “But we are scared from the government
and the police.”
The irony is that many Muslims say they feel more — not less — marginalized as the months since Sept. 11 have
rolled on. “I think the larger American community doesn’t appreciate how the Arab and Muslim communities,
like all New Yorkers, were traumatized by what happened Sept. 11, but this was a double trauma for them in that .
. . they were also stigmatized and in some cases blamed for what happened,” said Emira Habiby Browne,
executive director of the Arab-American Family Support Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. “Now with the
anniversary coming up, people feel very insecure, very vulnerable and very unprotected. They feel they can be
accused of anything, and they’re suspected of everything — regardless of who they are or what they’ve done in
this country. This is a community that feels under siege.”
Akram Jamil, a Yemeni man living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said he suffers from panic attacks since federal
agents broke into his apartment with drawn guns shortly before 6 a.m. on June 26, in an apparently misguided
search for someone else. When they realized their error — after handcuffing him and his wife and beginning to
ransack the apartment — Jamil said, the men left quickly without an apology and proceeded to the door of one of
his neighbors.
“I’m living in constant fear now,” said the 23-year-old custodian for the New York City school district, speaking
through a translator. “If I hear a loud noise whether I’m on the subway or at my job, my heart pounds. And I’m a
man, so you can imagine how my wife is faring.”
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Article 5.2 = Even Muslims who are well established as doctors, lawyers and academics and hold American
citizenship say they feel threatened.
“Some of the Muslim groups that were raided this spring are very pro-U.S. and pro-Western,” said Muqtedar
Khan, a political scientist at Adrien College in Michigan who has been an outspoken critic of Islamic extremism.
“That sent a message that no one is safe.”
To be sure, the picture is not uniformly negative. A poll of U.S. Muslims recently released by a national Islamic
advocacy group captured hardships — but also portents of hope. The poll reported that 57 percent of American
Muslims said they experienced bias or discrimination in the months since Sept. 11, and almost all of the 945
respondents (87 percent) said they knew of someone who had. Almost half said their lives had changed for the
worse following the attacks.
Yet that same poll, conducted by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations in late July and
early August, found that more than three in four Muslim Americans (79 percent) said they also had experienced
kindness and support from friends, colleagues and communities of other faiths.
“The results of this survey show that while we have all gone through a traumatic year in our nation’s history, there
is hope for the future if Americans who support and practice tolerance challenge the vocal minority who seek to
divide our nation,” said CAIR executive director Nihad Awad.
Many speak movingly about the power of even isolated acts of tolerance. Mohammad Tariq Sherwani, director of
the Muslim Center of New York in Flushing, recalls the gratitude he felt toward a Christian neighbor who left a
bouquet of flowers two days after Sept. 11 with a scrawled card: “Don’t worry, we love you.” Hoda Spiteri of
North Babylon, a radiant woman in a head scarf and loose, flowing clothing, said she has experienced “nothing
but positives” as she speaks to non-Muslim gatherings about her faith.
Nine months ago she gave birth to her third child, and in an act of solidarity with her non-Muslim neighbors, she
named him in honor of the patriarch shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
“We all come from the same lineage,” she said, bouncing curly-haired Ibrahim on her lap. “It’s just that we
practice a little differently. That’s what I want to teach my children — to be accepting of everyone and not to pass
judgment on people based on stereotypes. And I pray that that is how people will treat them.”
Yet, Spiteri, a board member of the Islamic Center of Long Island, believes the tolerance she experiences at the
grassroots level does not extend to the reaches of government. Like virtually every individual interviewed for this
story, she said she has begun to fear that the government’s war on terrorism is, in fact, becoming a war on Islam
— President George W. Bush’s protestations notwithstanding.
“Something went upside down and inside out after Sept. 11,” she said.
Some Muslim communities have begun to mount their own counteroffensives.
On a recent Muslim holy day, a big bear of a man in a double-breasted black suit lectures sternly to several
hundred of the faithful worshiping at the Muslim Center of New York.
“My brothers and sisters, it is wrong to stay inside your house and think this storm is going to pass,” said Bassem
Khafagi, community affairs director of the national office of CAIR.
“We owe it to our kids to stand up and explain who we are and what we believe. Otherwise, what kind of country
are you going to leave them? A country that hates them? A country that knows nothing about their religion?
Would you like your kid to say someday, ‘Oh, my dad left me with a million dollars, but with no dignity?’”
Khafagi left no doubt about what he regarded as the path to salvation in America.
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“Are you an ambassador of Islam? Are you telling others about Islam? If you’re not doing your job, then don’t
curse the media, please. Each one of us is responsible.” With the approaching anniversary, several national
advocacy groups are trumpeting that message in mosques across the country, urging the faithful to throw open
their doors to the community and to hold days of “unity and prayer” to mark Sept. 11.
“Sometimes the reaction of people who feel under siege, as Muslim people do today, is to retreat and defend
themselves,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for CAIR. “But we feel the best way to defend the community is
to reach out and bring people in. Ignorance is the root of hatred and bias crimes.”
Perhaps the most articulate defense is coming from an increasingly visible and vocal community of young
Muslims, many of whom were born and raised in this country.
Aasma Khan, a 31-year-old Manhattan attorney, has worked virtually full time this past year to spread the
message of a moderate Islam as a founding member of Muslims Against Terrorism, a New York-based group of
mostly young, well-educated professionals formed in the days immediately after the attacks.
“I think my generation has claimed an American identity and is leading the way,” she said over coffee recently.
Whether Khan is warning of the consequences of the government’s assault on civil liberties or defending her
choice not to cover her shoulder-length red-brown hair, she is a fearless advocate.
“I’m not afraid as a Muslim who’s an American citizen,” she said of the government’s detention of terror
suspects. “I’m afraid as an American citizen. I may be the first to go, but I won’t be the last.” As for the decision
to forgo a hijab, or head scarf, Khan tells critics: “That’s between God and me, and I’ll be held accountable on
Judgment Day. Implicit in that is that I’m not accountable to you.”
Khan believes that Muslim-Americans are at a crossroads, not just in their relationship to America, but in
relationship to their faith. “In some ways,” she said, “9/11 ripped the lid off the discussion, and it’s become much
more vibrant and robust, and in some ways it’s become more respectable even as it becomes more critical.” Open
conversations are taking place, she said, about how engaged Muslims should be in secular politics, equality for
women, and the need for greater tolerance among Muslims of different ethnic and racial communities. And those
discussions, in turn, have sparked new energy and commitment, particularly on the part of young, American-born
Muslims like herself.
Khan believes that a purer, more tolerant Islam is being forged in the American melting pot, simply because it is
one of the few places in the world where Muslims of different cultures worship side by side and have the freedom
to debate their beliefs. And she is confident that in the not too distant future, her faith community will be fully
accepted into the American mainstream.
“If we do this right,” she said, “it will be an example for Muslims around the world.”
Copyright © 2009, Newsday Inc.
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Article # 6 -Immigration crackdown shatters Muslims' lives
A plane filled with deportees provides a glimpse into an initiative aimed at men from Islamic
nations. Justified in the name of security, it hasn't yielded a single public charge of
terrorism.
By Cam Simpson, Flynn McRoberts and Liz Sly | Tribune staff reporters
November 16, 2003
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
The 75 passengers on the Icelandair jet sat strapped to their seats, cloth bands cinching their arms to their waists for all
but the final descent of the three-leg, 20-hour flight.
Struggling to feed themselves, they spilled rice and meat onto the floor of the cabin. A trip to the bathroom required the
escort of a federal agent.
After the plane screeched to a halt in the sweltering July heat, U.S. officials herded the men off the jet and onto the soil
of their native Pakistan. The purpose of the flight: deportation. Why them? Their nationality.
Some of the men had been jailed for months before they were tossed out of America. Some had been convicted of
crimes. All had been in the U.S. illegally. But the chief reason many were singled out is they were from one of the
Muslim countries targeted by American officials trying to foil another Sept. 11.
Since Sept. 11, 2001:
83,310 Number of foreign visitors from 24 predominantly Muslim nations who registered with the government after
U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft required them to do so. (North Koreans also required to register.)
13,740 Number of those 83,310 who were ordered into deportation proceedings.
0 Number who were publicly charged with terrorism, although officials say a few have terrorism connections.
"I pay taxes for 13 years, I pay contribution to society," Mohammad Akbar said as he walked through Chaklala
International Airport, wearing a dazed look and the same clothes he had on when the 7-Eleven manager was arrested in
New Jersey in April. "Only because I'm Muslim."
Akbar is one of more than 13,000 men the government moved to deport as part of a Bush administration dragnet that
even its own officials acknowledge was a hastily assembled and blunt tool. They say they are not targeting Muslims,
but people from nations where terrorists operate.
Four planes filled with deported Pakistanis had preceded Akbar's flight, starting in June 2002, and one more has
followed.
To assess the impact of the immigration crackdown, the Tribune tracked passengers on the July flight to the dusty
villages and teeming cities of Pakistan.
Their stories illustrate how the campaign has ruptured families, separating men from their U.S.-citizen wives and
children. They show how the government effectively put a premium on catching scofflaws from mostly Muslim nations
while allowing hundreds of thousands of violators from other countries, including convicted criminals, to wander free.
The entire exercise--carried out by executive fiat and largely outside the realm of public debate--has not led to a single
public charge of terrorism.
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At the same time, the policies have sowed resentment in the communities in America and abroad that are needed to
thwart potential terrorists, deepening suspicions held by Muslims that the U.S. government is anti-Islam.
One Justice Department initiative, first pitched primarily as a hunt for men from a handful of countries designated as
state sponsors of terrorism, became an exercise in labeling tens of thousands of men from 24 predominantly Muslim
nations as "high national security concerns."
That program, which required those men to register with the federal government, is an example of how U.S. authorities
increasingly are turning to tactics based not "on individualized suspicion, leads or tips" but instead rooted in "broadbased criteria that are inherently discriminatory, like what country you happened to be born in," said Michael Wishnie,
a law professor at New York University who has studied the measures.
"The message to entire communities--Arabs, Muslims and South Asians--is that you are suspect," Wishnie said.
The crackdown has set off an exodus from tightknit Muslim communities in the U.S., from the Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis of Chicago's Devon Avenue to the Arabs of such cities as Dearborn, Mich. Even lawful residents have
fled, fearing they might be next.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, many Americans would argue that the crackdown is an appropriate response: Why not
try to make the nation safer, while fixing its porous immigration system, starting with people from countries where
Muslim extremists live?
In fact, while three of the Sept. 11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, a sweeping, bipartisan congressional probe later
cited shoddy intelligence work, not poor immigration enforcement, as being at the root of the nation's vulnerability that
day.
A senior Justice Department official, responding to questions about the new immigration initiatives, said they emerged
from a series of meetings following the attacks in which participants asked themselves two questions: "Are we doing
everything we can to keep Americans safe? And are we using all of the tools at our disposal?"
While there is no evidence that the campaign has thwarted any terrorist plots, the government says it has led to the
identification of a handful of men with connections to terrorist groups. Citing national security concerns, the
government won't reveal their identities or alleged ties.
One of the architects of the policies said that, with limited resources, selecting men based on their foreign citizenship
was logical. "We had to just use the very blunt instrument of nationality," said Kris Kobach, a former Justice
Department appointee, who helped craft the program to register more than 83,000 men from Muslim countries who
were in the U.S.
The government has targeted people by nationality during earlier times of crisis, most notably with the internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Though the men now being singled out are not American citizens--and the U.S. always has afforded fewer rights to
visitors--their treatment reflects the tension over civil liberties since Sept. 11. Like the debate over the USA Patriot Act,
the immigration crackdown has underscored the difficulty of balancing national security with core American values
such as justice and freedom.
Certainly, the government continues to enforce immigration laws against other nationalities. That was made abundantly
clear last month when federal authorities raided 60 Wal-Marts and later accused the giant retailer of using illegal
immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
And the number of deported Mexicans, who make up about 69 percent of all illegal immigrants in the U.S., still dwarfs
the number of deportees from Muslim countries.
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Yet illegal immigrants from all countries removed in the first 12 months after Sept. 11 decreased by about 16 percent,
to 148,619 from 177,452. Over the same period, the administration's dragnet swept up increasing numbers of men from
two dozen Muslim countries. The number of Egyptians removed skyrocketed by 201 percent and Jordanians, 144
percent--even before the major initiatives focusing on such men began.
In sheer numbers, Pakistanis have been most affected, mainly because they are by far the biggest group of visitors to
the U.S. from Muslim lands.
The impact can be seen in the names on the deportation hearing dockets of the nation's immigration courts. Since Sept.
11, "the demographics have totally changed," said Christopher Helt, an immigration attorney who practices in Chicago,
Memphis and Atlanta.
"You went from Gonzalez to Khan. Now 90 percent of my clients are Muslim," Helt said.
Working for a future
The men aboard the Icelandair charter from upstate New York to Islamabad did not always hew to the letter of the
nation's immigration laws. But many followed the spirit of the American experience, staking their families' futures on
long hours of work on the fringes of this nation's economy.
Seated in the cabin was a 22-year-old New York City resident plucked from his bed in Queens who had just opened his
own cell-phone store on the Upper West Side and thought he was legal until agents raided his family's home before
dawn last winter.
A few rows away sat Mohammad Akbar, 48, who had befriended beat cops and other customers over coffee at the 7Eleven where he worked in suburban Philadelphia. He submitted in April to the administration's "special registration"
for men from Muslim countries, only to be shackled before the afternoon was out.
Not far from him was a supervisor of car-wash workers who was caught dozing in his car behind a Schaumburg office
complex. Authorities detained him on a nearly 8-year-old deportation order. He's now jobless in Pakistan while the
wife he left behind in a suburban apartment struggles to pay the bills.
At least a dozen of the 75 men on this flight likely would have been deported anyway because they were convicted of
crimes, including drug offenses and assault.
But the vast majority of them were found to be in violation of civil immigration laws, such as remaining in the U.S. on
an expired visa. Some spent half a year or more behind bars, wondering if they ever would be reunited with their
families. Convinced they faced impossible odds, many finally surrendered their legal battles, unwilling to stay another
day in jail.
A post-9/11 scramble
In the first chaotic weeks after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, investigators fanned out across the country in a
haphazard, almost desperate scramble to stop what many Americans feared was an impending second wave of
terrorism. Given the nation's shock, there was wide public support for such a hunt.
The government detained more than 1,000 people in the initial arrests, virtually all of them held for alleged
immigration violations. They were overwhelmingly Arab or Muslim men, with the biggest percentage coming from
Pakistan.
Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft gave the impression that the men were suspected terrorists and that their arrests were
preventing new assaults.
But none of those men ever was charged with involvement in the attacks. And for most of them, there was no evidence
that they were terrorists, according to a report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, the department's
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internal watchdog. Responding to that report, FBI officials asserted that they had identified four men, whom they
declined to name, linked to terrorism or the hijackers.
Still, a precedent was set: The Justice Department would use the nation's immigration laws as the chief tool in its
domestic war on terrorism.
The first of these initiatives, begun in January 2002, seemed logical enough: Go after the 300,000 people whom
government records suggested were "absconders"-- those who remained in the U.S. despite orders to leave.
The program, called the "Absconder Apprehension Initiative," filtered its first targets by nationality, aiming only at
5,000 scofflaws from mostly Muslim nations where Al Qaeda was believed to have a presence.
Authorities identified these people by using immigration records, then searched for information about them in phone
books, public records and commercial databases. With those leads, teams of federal agents went out to find them.
Like the men aboard the July charter to Islamabad, and others on the four flights before them, they were picked up at
their homes or at the pizza parlors, cab stands, gas stations and construction sites where they worked.
To broaden the hunt, the Justice Department ordered that the names of the scofflaws be put into the criminal database
used by police departments nationwide. That automatically drew state and local authorities into the enforcement of civil
immigration laws, reversing a long-standing practice meant to avoid discouraging immigrants from reporting crimes
against them.
While the search was on for the 5,000 pinpointed by nationality, the other the 300,000 absconders from all countries
wandered free, and even grew to nearly 400,000 in the course of about 18 months, according to congressional
testimony.
The Department of Homeland Security, which inherited responsibility for immigration in March, moved into a second
phase of the program in June, identifying the most violent offenders who had outstanding deportation orders.
It had been a full year and a half since the absconder initiative was first outlined by the Justice Department.
Bittersweet reunions
After landing in Islamabad, the first of the July deportees walked through the glass doors of Chaklala International
Airport's arrival area into a crush of local reporters. Though largely unnoticed in the U.S., the men are front-page news
in Pakistan.
A hundred ceiling fans stirred the hot air above them. Taxi drivers cheered American professional wrestling bouts
blaring from television sets overhead as greeting parties smothered pilgrims from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, with kisses and
necklaces of marigolds.
A smaller, more anxious cluster of boys and men met the deportees. One young man stood dressed in a white "New
York, New York" T-shirt, complete with the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. His brother had been living
in Brooklyn, working at a chain store before he was detained.
Nearby, a teenager carried a cell phone to alert his mother the moment his older brother was home safely. It was the
brother's string of jobs at Baltimore gas stations that had been the family's lifeline.
"[He] was our only hope," the young man said. "Now they're sending him back, so God knows what will happen."
The return to Pakistan for another man, Amir Shah, began five months earlier and 7,000 miles away, in a handicap
parking space in Schaumburg.
It was just after 5 a.m. on Feb. 23 when a local police officer found Shah asleep inside the Pakistani's 1997 Chrysler
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Concorde. Shah, who oversaw car-wash crews, was parked behind his employer's office on Golf Road. He was waiting
for his boss to arrive when the police officer noticed him, pulled up in a squad car and rousted Shah from his slumber.
The officer ran Shah's name in the National Crime Information Center database, commonly known as NCIC, and got a
hit: Although Shah had not been charged with a crime, he was wanted on an immigration warrant for an outstanding
deportation order, police records show.
"I have a nice job, am doing everything good, never doing any crime," Shah said of his life in Schaumburg during an
interview in the guest room of his family's flat in Mandi Bahauddin, about three hours south of Islamabad.
He told the arresting officer that he knew he had remained in the U.S. illegally, but Shah believed his 1999 marriage in
a New York mosque to Habeeba Nayeem, a green-card holder at the time who later became a U.S. citizen, would shield
him from deportation.
Holders of green cards--the prized plastic card signifying its holder is a legal resident, though not a citizen of the U.S.-can sponsor spouses for their own cards. Although it is unclear whether Shah would have had a chance of winning
approval, Nayeem delayed filing the paperwork.
She had long heard cautionary tales--including from customers at the Schaumburg hair salon where she works--about
men marrying only to get legal residency. She wanted to make sure Shah's intentions were true.
To test him, Nayeem had decided she would wait to file the sponsorship papers; she wanted to see if he would try to
hustle her to an immigration lawyer after their wedding.
He never did, passing her test. But time slipped away and she had not filed the paperwork before her husband was
detained.
Now she blames herself for the result. "I feel guilty," Nayeem said, sitting in her living room in a working-class
Schaumburg apartment complex, where women and young men in traditional Pakistani dress are a common sight. "I
want to fight for him."
Shah's new life is a world apart from his old one.
Except for short spans of blacktop here and there, the last major stretch of roadway to Mandi Bahauddin is made of dirt
and stone. Men swinging hammers at rock piles along the shoulder struggle to fill the many ruts. Cars, motorbikes and
brightly decorated buses with passengers hanging from the sides narrowly miss each other as they race by in opposite
directions.
Boys frequently interrupt the traffic, herding cows and goats across the road and into the Upper Jhelum Canal.
Inside the town, women wash clothes in roadside ditches brimming with brown water. The street in front of Shah's
home, alongside an open sewer, is so narrow that even if it were here, the Chrysler Concorde he used to drive past
Woodfield Mall wouldn't fit.
Nayeem visited for about a month shortly after Shah returned to Pakistan. Back in Schaumburg, she hopes the help of a
legal-aid service eventually will return her husband to America.
Shah, who earned a degree in physics before he came to the U.S., still is without work. He is forced to rely on the help
of his brothers, who occasionally give him money, according to Nayeem.
"It's not so easy there to get a job," she said. "It's a very big problem, hard time for him."
As for Nayeem, she struggles to get to her hairdresser job every day because she has diabetes and other ailments.
Without Shah's income, she fights to pay the bills and the rent.
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Article 6.1 - Words vs. deeds
During a Sept. 13, 2001, news conference in Washington, Ashcroft urged Americans not to "descend to the level of
those who perpetrated Tuesday's violence by targeting individuals based on race, religion or national origin."
Yet the administration went on to launch a program centered on nationality that would register 83,310 men in the U.S.
from predominantly Muslim countries. Told that it was their legal obligation, many complied, only to face deportation.
Ashcroft introduced the core of the program, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, in June 2002. In
doing so he described it as nothing more than carrying out a small piece of a 1996 law that asked the Justice
Department to better track the arrivals and departures of every one of the estimated 35 million foreign visitors to the
U.S. each year.
But Ashcroft also used his own authority to go much further than Congress had mandated. Tapping decades-old
statutory provisions, his department created a separate registration program for men who already were in the U.S. as
foreign visitors. Nationality would become the determining factor in deciding which of them would be required to
comply.
If terrorists were living secretly in the U.S., the registration would put "people who are up to no good on notice," said
the Justice Department official last week, special on condition of anonymity. They would have to "either come in and
register, which they don't want to do, or they risk not complying and fear we're going to come and get them."
In introducing the registration program, the attorney general answered questions about possible discrimination against
Muslims by saying that only foreigners from nations designated as state sponsors of terrorism would face a blanket
edict to register.
Five months later, the Justice Department named its first official targets: men from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria,
all Muslim countries on the State Department's terrorism list.
But over the next 10 weeks, the Justice Department revealed that the domestic registration list would grow to include
all men who were foreign visitors from 19 other predominantly Muslim nations. Turkey and Uzbekistan were the only
large Muslim countries not on the list. North Korea, a designated state sponsor of terrorism, was the only non-Muslim
country added.
Under the edict, men would have to report to the federal government for photographs, fingerprinting and questioning.
Because some American Muslims endured taunts and even physical attacks after Sept. 11, some community leaders
saw the registration as an opportunity to demonstrate the law-abiding nature of their countrymen. Sadruddin Noorani, a
business owner and leader in Chicago's Pakistani community, hit the hustings last winter as the registration deadline
approached.
He spoke on ethnic radio programs. He held weekly seminars, renting restaurants, community centers and hotel
ballrooms. On Jan. 12, 2003, the day before registration began for Pakistanis, more than 700 people crowded into the
Ramada Plaza O'Hare to hear Noorani and others repeat a mantra he wrote on a slip of paper he keeps in his wallet to
this day.
"Willfully violating the law of the land by not registering," it reads, "you will face the consequences."
Hundreds of families with questions about their immigration status were torn: Should they register and risk deportation
or ignore the call to register and hope no federal agents hunted them down?
Thousands chose to pack all they owned into trucks, vans and taxis and drive to Canada--hoping for refugee status.
Once the program was under way, some influential Democrats in Congress were furious that Ashcroft had claimed
congressional authority for his actions but had not consulted them before initiating the registration.
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In a letter to Ashcroft dated Dec. 23, 2002, three lawmakers on Capitol Hill's judiciary committees--Sen. Russell
Feingold of Wisconsin, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan--demanded
answers. They said there were "grave doubts" about whether the program struck a proper balance between civil liberties
and security.
The program, they said, "appears to be a component of a second wave of roundups and detentions of Arab and Muslim
males disguised as a perfunctory registration requirement."
The Justice Department made no substantial changes, denying the registration was discriminatory. Its lawyers have
pointed to a legal principle, known as the plenary power doctrine, that gives the government broad authority to
selectively enforce immigration laws with limited oversight from the courts.
One of the last corners of the law where such selective enforcement still is allowed, the plenary power doctrine was
established by the Supreme Court at the end of the 19th Century in upholding the exclusion of Chinese immigrants
from the U.S. after Congress deemed them "undesirable."
That doctrine often has insulated the government from claims that it is violating the Constitution's equal protection
clause when it imposes different burdens among immigrant groups.
The domestic campaign, said the senior official at the Justice Department, has "put some effectiveness into the
immigration law for at least a subset of visitors, and to that extent I think it's been valuable."
But that argument rings hollow in the Muslim enclaves of America, where community leaders such as Noorani warn
that the unequal treatment of Muslim men inevitably will create a backlash.
Those deported through the campaign, he predicted, will say: "We were a good ambassador to this country. We worked
hard. We paid our taxes. We committed no crimes. And they kicked us out."
Similar resentment can be heard in the hometowns of the men on the July Icelandair flight--sprawling urban centers
such as Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi as well as villages in Pakistan's hinterlands.
"People in every class of Pakistani society think differently about the U.S.," Khurran Nazir, 23, an Islamabad street
vendor, said when asked about the recent deportation of Pakistani men. "The U.S. does not like Muslims."
Of the roughly 83,000 who registered, the government moved to deport 13,740 for various immigration violations.
Government officials point out that once the men registered, agents could not ignore alleged violations.
Many of the men are fighting their cases, but few can expect to succeed, according to lawyers who have run mass legal
clinics for them.
In the end, many forced out of the U.S. will never appear in deportation statistics. Chiefly to save taxpayer money, the
government says it has been encouraging the vast majority of men caught in the dragnet to accept what is known as
voluntary departure--a sort of immigration plea bargain that effectively results in self-deportation.
Many already are gone.
A costly compliance
With a pencil-thin mustache and a jittery, lanky frame, Mohammad Akbar was anxious by nature.
But he also knew that he was in violation of immigration laws, thanks to a 1995 deportation order that he still was
fighting. He worried that any infraction, even a parking ticket, would mean trouble.
So when he heard in the spring that the federal government was requiring registration of all men visiting from Pakistan,
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Akbar had to weigh the dangers of visiting the local Immigration and Naturalization Service office. He decided, finally,
that he could not flout the law.
"I went because I'm scared--if they catch me without registration, they come arrest me," he said. "I have to follow the
U.S. law. . . . They said to register."
Akbar arrived in America in November 1990. Not long after, he found work at a 7-Eleven on Gibbsboro Road in
Lindenwold, N.J., eventually moving up to manager and earning $7.50 an hour.
Despite the modest wage, life was good. His customers, including local cops, had become a sort of second family. He
even married one of the regulars, a Jersey native he got to know in long, late-night chats at the convenience store.
"We all know him--great guy," said Sgt. Douglas Reynolds of the Lindenwold police. "If he didn't see an officer for a
while, he would ask how he was doing, just to make sure he was all right."
Akbar stepped into the INS office in Cherry Hill, N.J., on April 25. Things seemed to be going fine at first as he sat
down across from an immigration agent. The agent was cordial, only jokingly asking if Akbar was a member of any
fundamentalist Islamic groups or if he knew any terrorists.
"I don't know anybody" connected to such groups, Akbar recalled telling him. "I'm not like that."
But when the agent got to the matter of his 1995 deportation order, the tenor of the conversation shifted. "I'm sorry," he
remembers the agent telling him. "You must go to jail."
Guards stepped into the interview room with shackles, Akbar said. They cuffed his hands and feet and led him away to
the Monmouth County Jail as he pleaded with them.
"I told them: `I'm not a murderer. I invested money in the bank. I do work hard,' " he said. "But no mercy. There's no
mercy."
Despite their differences, even Akbar's estranged wife, Tamika Lindsay, couldn't understand his treatment. "You're
talking a man . . . whose only crime was his visa ran out," she said.
In late July, along a narrow concrete alley in the Pakistani town of Hazro, the brilliant blue doors of the Akbar family
home swung open. Thirteen years after Mariyam Khursheed's youngest son left for America, there he stood.
She took her 48-year-old son's head in her hands, kissed his forehead and gave thanks to Allah. "I'm 82 years old and
I'm sick," Akbar later recalled her telling him. "I thought I would never see you again in my life."
He was not returning to poverty. Generations of his family have made a good living in Hazro, which sits a couple of
hours northwest of Islamabad along the ancient Grand Trunk Road, past donkey-drawn carts and marble strip mines.
His older brother Shamroze is a real estate broker. Before going to America, Akbar ran a small grocery store.
Sitting inside the cramped courtyard of the family's home, he decried how he was treated in America but said he held
no ill will toward U.S. citizens. "The American people didn't do this to me," he said. "It was the government."
Having managed during his time in the U.S. to put away about $20,000, Akbar said he hoped to use some of that to
open a business in Hazro or perhaps Karachi.
His ultimate goal, though, remains the same: to return to the U.S."I know America better than my motherland because I
live a long time there," he said. "One day," his brother Shamroze added, "they will realize that they were wrong, and he
will go back."
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Article # 7 -U.S. ends Muslim registry
Program that profiled by nationality yielded no terrorism charges
By Cam Simpson and Flynn McRoberts.
December 2, 2003
WASHINGTON
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that it is largely scrapping a controversial Justice
Department-initiated program requiring men from predominantly Muslim nations to come in for questioning,
fingerprinting and photographing.
The domestic registration program, which resulted in more than 83,000 foreign men in the U.S. being labeled
"high national security concerns" because of their nationalities, also led to deportation proceedings against almost
14,000 of the men. Many of them had overstayed visas or ignored previous deportation orders.
But the mandate, unveiled in June 2002 by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft as a counterterrorism initiative, did not
produce terrorism charges against anyone.
The program also sowed resentment in communities in America and abroad, deepening suspicions among
Muslims that the U.S. government is anti-Islam.
The administration's announcement that it would suspend most of the requirements came as many in the first
group of about 4,000 men scheduled to renew their registrations were filing into immigration offices throughout
the country.
While blanket registration requirements are being dropped, officials said a small but unspecified number of men
out of the more than 83,000 who originally registered could be required to come in for new interviews. The men
would be alerted by government notices, officials said.
The Tribune highlighted the domestic registration program last month in a three-part series, "Tossed Out of
America," which looked at the toll the initiative and others built on profiling by nationality have taken on
individuals and families. A wave of deportations has sent men from predominantly Muslim nations to uncertain
futures, separating them from wives and children, including U.S. citizens, while thousands of others fled
immigrant enclaves in fear.
In dropping most of the registration requirements Monday, Homeland Security Department officials, who
inherited responsibility for the program from the Justice Department in March, said they were not responding to
"recent public pressure" and that they have been reviewing the effort for more than a month. The domestic
program mandated registration--under threat of deportation--for all men from 24 predominantly Muslim nations
and North Korea.
Immigrant groups applauded Monday's move but said it comes too late.
They said there will be no relief for the almost 14,000 men in deportation proceedings as a result of the
registration process, although it appears a large number of new cases feared by leaders in immigrant communities
will be averted.
"We're glad that the Department of Homeland Security has seen the wisdom of suspending the program," said
Fred Tsao of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "However, feeling glad about this is like
being thankful to a bully after he has stopped hitting us. Much of the damage has already been done."
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The Homeland Security Department said it also is dropping a companion requirement that those who registered at
secondary screening posts set up at the nation's borders submit to interviews 30 days after their arrival in the
country.
U.S.: 11 had terrorist links
Although none of the more than 83,000 men who registered with the government were charged with terrorism,
officials said a few were identified as having terrorist links. Border and domestic checks combined yielded 11
such men, they said, declining to say how many of them were in the U.S.
But Asa Hutchinson, Homeland Security undersecretary for border and transportation security, said Monday that
there were few, if any, counterterrorism benefits from the domestic registration part of the program.
Any leads, he said, "were largely, if not all, from the port-of-entry inspection. . . . We looked at what kind of
benefit, what kind of leads were being generated by the domestic reregistration, and it was minimal in number."
While Hutchinson said, "I applaud the Justice Department for implementing this," he also said his agency now has
to focus on "individualized, intelligence-based investigations" instead of "huge, broad categories," such as
nationality.
The border checks are being overtaken by a new system, in the works before Ashcroft's June 2002 announcement,
that ultimately will track entries and exits of all of the roughly 35million foreign visitors who enter the U.S.
annually.
There has been widespread confusion about the status of the domestic registration program in immigrant
communities since last week, when word first leaked out that changes were being considered. Many men still
were coming in to reregister at immigration offices, following the government orders they were given a year ago.
Security and insecurity
One of those men, Abdessamad Benioual, 29, a Chicago cabdriver from Morocco, said he understood the
government's need to make Americans feel safer after the Sept. 11 attacks. But in requiring men from Muslim
countries to register, "They make foreigners who spent so many years here working hard, getting up early every
morning, trying to live the American dream, they make these people feel insecure in order to make the American
people feel secure," said Benioual, who reregistered last week at the Kluczynski Federal Building in the Loop.
The program also required people who had to register to follow special procedures when they left the country, or
face being barred from readmission.
That will not be dropped under the changes outlined Monday. And immigration lawyers feared the announcement
would confuse those leaving the country about their responsibilities, possibly resulting in people being barred
from re-entering the U.S. for what amounts to paperwork problems.
Sadruddin Noorani, a business owner who escorted hundreds of South Asians to registration last winter in
Chicago, said he was relieved for the Devon Avenue families who would not have to register again.
"I have seen personally the tears in their eyes. I have seen their suffering. I have seen their anxiety," Noorani said.
"So I feel a great deal of relief that those people will not be crying again like they were last January and
February."
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Article # 8 -'There's going to be trouble'
In Britain’s communities, things are growing tense between Muslims and their neighbors
BY LETTA TAYLER
July 21, 2005
BEESTON, England
It's barely noon on a recent day in this blighted Leeds suburb, but Gareth McCourt, a construction
worker with the words "100 percent white" tattooed across his belly, is already thirsting for blood.
"There's going to be a lot of trouble," promises McCourt, 21, as he drains another pint at the Tommy
Wass pub, a Beeston hangout for white men with shaved heads, abundant tattoos and little hope.
"There's too many Asians around here. And what happened is too close to home, ain't it?"
Across town, where the Muslims live, a cluster of young Britons of Pakistani heritage cup their hands in
a beckoning gesture to bring on the fight. "We can handle ourselves," says one, Shair Kaman, 28, a
property manager whose perfect English blends cockney and Pakistani accents. "If they come at us, we'll
come at them."
In Beeston and other British communities with Muslim immigrant populations, ethnic tension has soared
since news broke that the four suicide bombers in London's terror attacks July 7 were British citizens or
residents, three of Pakistani heritage and all followers of Islam.
Radical elements on both sides "want to provoke. They want to create division and discord," warned
Shahid Malik, a Muslim member of Parliament, in a recent interfaith gathering in Dewsbury, a former
mill town near here where one bombing suspect lived. "If you are provoked, they win."
More violence, Malik added in an interview, could lead to further militancy among disaffected Muslim
youths.
Renewed race riots feared
Local officials are particularly concerned about violence in Beeston, Dewsbury and other communities
in the West Yorkshire midlands where the four bomb suspects lived. Some fear the areas could be swept
by race riots similar to those that convulsed three British towns for several days in mid-2001 after white
youths attacked a South Asian man's home.
Those riots, in which mobs of white and South Asian youths clashed with police and each other as they
trashed stores, pubs and cars, swept areas similar to the bombers' hometowns: former white, blue-collar
enclaves that drew thousands of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Muslim immigrants to mill jobs that
were plentiful a few decades back. But the mills have closed, making work scarce for everyone. South
Asians outnumber whites in some neighborhoods, and the groups live in virtual apartheid.
Already in Beeston and Dews- bury, attacks against Muslims are cropping up like boils.
Last week in Beeston, where three of the bombers lived or worked, a mob of about 60 white men
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descended on a pub and began insulting a couple with dark skin. Eight men were arrested for disorderly
conduct.
That same night, a white man lunged at a Pakistani immigrant as he left a Beeston fast-food takeout joint
and screamed between curses, "Get out of my country, you Muslim terrorist." In a stroke of luck, a
passing patrol car stopped the commotion. "But I'm still terrified to walk the streets," the immigrant,
Haw Nawaz, 44, told Newsday.
In Dewsbury, a Pakistani taxi driver trembled as he recounted how a white man tried to strike him in his
cab last week while shouting: "You Muslims are all terrorists. I'm going to kill you."
"I thought I might die," said the cabbie, a father of five who was too scared to give his name. "In all my
29 years here, I've never had any trouble before."
Efforts to curb violence
Police and community groups are fanning through neighborhoods distributing leaflets in a half-dozen
languages that give victims hotline numbers and the warning, "Harassment of any form will not be
tolerated."
Multilingual fliers are necessary in Muslim sections of West Yorkshire, where halal kebab shops
outnumber pubs, and most women dress in head scarves and saris or black, shapeless robes. In
Dewsbury, many women also don a black veil known as the parda that covers everything but their eyes.
Such communities are rife with "Islamophobia," a government report on the 2001 riots warned. Whites
"still look backwards to some supposedly halcyon days of a monocultural society," while Muslims "look
to their country of origin for some form of identity."
BNP party gains popularity
In this environment, the British National Party, whose primary goal is to halt immigration, is flourishing.
In March parliamentary elections, the party captured 13 percent of the vote, the second-highest
percentage in the country, in the district that includes Dewsbury and borders Beeston.
Immediately after the London bombings, the party circulated fliers that bore a photograph of the bombed
bus in which 14 died and the slogan: "Maybe now it's time to start listening to the BNP."
Nick Cass, the ruddy-cheeked BNP chairman for Yorkshire, supports the flier. "More immigration will
lead to more suicide bombers," Cass said unapologetically in an interview last weekend.
In a discourse that Muslim leaders note echoes the slurs of white supremacists against blacks or of Nazis
against Jews, Cass sprinkles the conversation with lines like: "You no longer feel safe in your hometown
because of the Islamics. It's gotten to the point where you feel like you've been dropped into the middle
of Bangladesh." Cass also said, without offering proof, that Asian men lure white, underage girls into
becoming concubines. "They call them 'white meat,'" he said.
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Communities divided
Most people are just trying to go about their lives in Beeston, a rundown suburb of red-brick rowhouses
where some young whites swill beer all day on their stoops and young Pakistani and Bangladeshi men
openly smoke marijuana in narrow alleyways. And many from all creeds and colors appear to genuinely
seek racial harmony. But even before the July 7 bombings in London, residents say, whites and blacks
routinely squared off against South Asians.
Last year here, a gang of about 20 youths of Pakistani heritage cornered and killed a mixed-race
teenager named Tyrone Clarke, beating him with cricket bats and metal poles before stabbing him three
times in the back. Four of the attackers are serving life sentences.
"The Asians think they rule everything," said Clarke's mother, Lorraine Fraser, who says she still gets
hate messages she believes are from South Asians, including a recent cell-phone text message that read,
"Bang Bang."
"You've got it better in America, don't you? You've got the death penalty," Fraser said. "Here they get
three hot meals a day and color television."
Richard Walshaw, 39, a white, heavily tattooed father of two who lives in Beeston Hill, a predominantly
Muslim neighborhood where two of the suicide bombers grew up, counters, "I'm more scared of the
whites, personally." White youths threw a cherry bomb at his wife, also white, as she walked home the
other evening and are even more aggressive toward South Asians, he said.
Fraser moved from Beeston after her son was killed. Beeston relatives of at least two of the suspected
bombers, including one who owns a local fish-and-chips shop, plan to do the same, saying they've been
threatened and harassed since the blasts.
Back at Tommy Wass pub, McCourt hopes they do so soon. Otherwise, he said with a grin, "I can see a
chip shop getting blown up."
Copyright © 2009, Newsday Inc.
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Article #9 - Blacks split on support for illegal immigrants
Many are backers, but fight for jobs spurs foes
By Oscar Avila
Tribune staff reporter
April 23, 2006
When more than 100,000 protesters marched through the streets of Chicago to support illegal
immigrants, Rev. Gregory Daniels and other African-American leaders took notice.
Daniels is trying to mobilize his own community, matching workers with jobs that pay well. In his
Englewood office, he has mounted poster boards with lists of workers he has connected to construction
jobs at Donald Trump's new building and other sites.
He's sympathetic to the marchers, but Daniels says illegal immigrants undercut Englewood residents by
flooding the market with workers willing to take less money.
"Let me tell you what the mind-set of the African-American is when they see those marches: `They are
here to replace us,'" Daniels said. "We've got to be careful because I don't want to see an eruption
between the blacks and the browns over the immigration issue."
As Mexicans and other immigrants around the U.S. mobilize for greater rights, increasingly employing
the tone and tactics of the 1960s civil rights movement, African-Americans have profound
disagreements about where they belong in the debate.
In Chicago, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Nation of Islam and the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now, which traditionally has targeted black neighborhoods, all have backed a
May 1 march for legalization, saying the plight of any marginalized worker should concern the black
community.
In the editorial pages of black newspapers and in neighborhood conversations, however, a growing
segment of African-Americans is raising doubts about supporting immigrants, especially lawbreakers,
who are often competitors for low-wage jobs.
Immigrants and lower wages
Researchers have identified a link between increased immigration and unemployment and falling wages
among some U.S.-born workers. The burden falls disproportionately on those with lower education
levels, including many African-Americans and legal immigrants.
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Some think the solution is to reduce the number of illegal immigrants working here, but others believe
that the route to better pay for all is to make more immigrants legal.
The recent marches have raised the volume on the debate about the presence of foreign workers that
started more than a century ago.
In a famous address, Booker T. Washington urged employers "to cast down your bucket where you are"
and hire newly freed slaves instead of "those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits."
More recently, Hispanics and African-Americans have found some common ground. In 2003, immigrant
activists formally incorporated a symbol of the civil rights movement when it staged "freedom rides,"
nationwide bus caravans for legalization.
The relationship has soured, at times, such as when Mexico President Vicente Fox outraged U.S. civil
rights groups when he said immigrants take jobs that "not even blacks want to do." Closer to home, New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned about an influx of Mexican workers coming to rebuild his city.
Rev. Anthony Williams, pastor at St. Stephens Evangelical Lutheran Church in Englewood, said he
resents immigrants comparing themselves to black civil rights activists. Although he praises their
courage and activism, Williams said the rhetoric and proposals of immigrants are misguided.
`2 different issues'
Williams said black protesters in the 1960s "got water hoses and dogs" so that other downtrodden
people, including illegal immigrants, could march today.
"It's two different issues," he said. "My thing is not to beat up on my Hispanic brothers and sisters.
That's not the issue. The issue is nobody is above the law. Our country has laws in how you enter this
country."
Williams is so passionate that he is working informally with the Chicago Minuteman Project, an
offshoot of a volunteer group that patrols the U.S.-Mexico border and advocates stricter immigration
enforcement.
It is the jobs issue that troubles African-Americans most.
A Pew Hispanic Center poll released last month found that 41 percent of African-American respondents
in Chicago said they had lost a job to an immigrant compared with 15 percent of white, non-Hispanic
respondents.
Labor experts say employers often prefer to hire illegal immigrants because they will accept lower
wages, can get paid in cash and have little leverage to combat abuses. Although black lawmakers have
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charged that employers avoid African-Americans with criminal records, illegal immigrants are largely
anonymous workers with apparently clean slates.
Sandra Mallory, an African-American Englewood resident who buys and renovates homes, said
Mexican workers give her fewer problems than others. Mallory, a former candidate for alderman,
attended a Pilsen news conference Monday to lend support to the May 1 march.
"Their word is good. They are professional. They aren't trying to flirt with you," Mallory said.
Daniels pointed some of the blame at black workers, who recently rejected landscaping jobs because the
jobs paid only $8 an hour. Of course, Daniels said, they might have taken the jobs if wages were higher.
And the wages probably dropped because the contractor's all-Hispanic crew jumped on the offer, he
said.
Harvard University professor George Borjas released a report in 2004 that found that African-American
wages fell 4.5 percent--a larger drop than among white workers--during an immigration boom between
1980 and 2000. He also found that the lower the education levels of workers, the more their wages
declined.
Josh Bernstein, federal policy director for the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Policy Center,
which generally favors immigrant rights, said Borjas and other researchers are correct that increased
immigration disproportionately harms minorities with lower educational levels.
A `win-win' for all workers
But by removing a key reason that immigrants accept lower wages--their illegal status--employers will
be forced to pay more, Bernstein said. That will increase wages across the board, he argues.
"I'm not going to put rose-colored glasses on what immigration does. It does cause economic dislocation
and, like all changes, the people who are on the lowest rungs are the ones hurt disproportionately.
"But just because there is a disproportionate impact doesn't mean that you should follow the policy
prescriptions of the anti-immigrant movement," he added. "I would argue that this makes the problem
worse."
That philosophy is why Ronald Kirk, who works in convention services at the Hyatt Regency Chicago,
is backing the immigrant marches.
Kirk, an African-American, said he has heard grumbling from some black co-workers and neighbors
since the immigration marches started. But Kirk, a shop steward for the UNITE-HERE Local 1 union,
said he thinks extending legal status will benefit all workers.
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"They are human beings," Kirk said softly. "Society let them break the law for years. Now that
immigrants want to be recognized, they should be. It's a win-win scenario for all workers."
Groups behind Chicago's immigrant marches have extended invitations to African-American community
groups but, so far, no black activists are among the main organizers.
Still, immigrant activists insist that African-American support, particularly from elected officials, will be
critical in Congress. They already have won support from officials such as U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (DIll), who introduced a bill that would grant legal status to 35 families facing separation because they
include both illegal immigrants and U.S. citizens.
Last month, the NAACP released a set of principles for immigration reform, opposing a focus on
enforcement, arguing that "we must move away from the politics of ostracizing immigrants."
Those sentiments from civil rights leaders are often at odds with the mood of the community, said Earl
Ofari Hutchinson, an author and political analyst who writes about immigration frequently for The
Chicago Defender and other media.
When Hutchinson convened three primarily black audiences in Los Angeles for discussions on
immigration, black panelists were taken aback by the vitriol from the audience. Hutchinson himself
received dozens of faxes and e-mails on the issue, none of which backed liberalizing immigration laws.
"What hit me was the vehemence, the anger, the passion, the hostility," Hutchinson said. "In the
mainstream civil rights leadership, [legalization] is seen as an issue of fairness, of economic justice, of
anti-discrimination. The average black person doesn't see it that way."
---------oavila@tribune.com
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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Article # 10 -JFK illegally targeting Muslims, groups say
BY BRYAN VIRASAMI
August 24, 2006
Muslim, Arab and South Asian passengers are being profiled by Homeland Security officers at Kennedy Airport,
civil liberties groups said Wednesday, citing a New Jersey family that was detained and interrogated after a flight
from Dubai last week.
The family, a mother and her 20-year-old twin daughters from Montclair, N.J., said they were plucked from the
baggage area, held six hours without food or water by Customs and Border Protection agents and questioned
about their views of Iraq.
Nahgam Alyaqoubi and her daughters, Arwa and Sumia Ibrahim, naturalized American citizens, said 200 other
passengers of Arab, Muslim or South Asian backgrounds were detained on Aug. 15 in a roped-off area, days after
the London bomb suspects were arrested.
The family joined officials from the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups at a news conference
in the Manhattan office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to condemn what they say has been an
increase in racial profiling since the London plot was uncovered. They also criticized Rep. Peter King for what
they said was profiling.
Arwa Ibrahim, who along with her sister is enrolled at Rutgers University, said they were born in Iraq and moved
to the United States at age 5. She said the experience was disturbing because they were forced to sit on the floor
without food or water and were treated rudely when they asked questions of the officers.
"It was a really humiliating experience -- humiliating because we were treated like animals," she said. "We were
treated really horribly by the officers that were there, we were yelled at, we were told to get back, threatened with
arrest and threatened to have to stay longer if we complained."
The ACLU and other rights groups said they planned to investigate this and several other complaints of profiling.
Lucille Cirillo, a supervisory Customs Border Protection officer in New York City, said the heightened alert after
the London arrests means more passengers are scrutinized. She said the Orange Alert dictates that some flights get
more attention.
Neither customs nor homeland security officers engage in racial profiling, she said. "But what I will say on the
matter is our officers will scrutinize more closely individuals arriving from high-risk countries," Cirillo said.
On the complaints about lack of water, she said airlines are required to provide food and water to passengers even
if they're off the plane and in the luggage area of the airport.
Katherine Metres Abbadi, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said recent
comments from King were inflammatory.
"Why is Congressman King calling for a policy which has been tried and proven not to work and which has been
disavowed by security experts?" she said.
King said he was speaking on the basis that the "next terrorist" will come from places like the Middle East or
South Asia. First of all, it's not ethnic or racial profiling," King said Wednesday. "What I'm saying, though, is that
screeners should have the right to ask additional questions of a person who belongs to a particular ethnic or
religious group if members of that group have threatened the United States."
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Article #11 -Meaning of Islam: Myths, stereotypes hide the truth
By Altaf Ali
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
September 15, 2008
Ask the average person what they know about Islam, they might say, "It is the religion of the Arabs" or
"Jihad means holy war."
Some would even say that the Quran, Islam's revealed text, "promises terrorists 72 virgins when they
die."
Unfortunately, there are many myths and stereotypes about Islam. The "72 virgins" belief is probably the
most misused and abused stereotype.
Add the misperceptions of Jihad and you'll have an accumulation of myths and fears that will inevitably
lead to Islam being marginalized and stigmatized.
Today, negative opinions about Islam are unfortunately escalating.
The Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey last year
indicating that 45 percent of Americans said Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence
among its believers.
Let me set the record straight: suicide is forbidden in Islam.
In fact, suicide is forbidden in the Quran and in the sayings and example, Hadith, of the Prophet
Muhammad. The Quran and authentic Hadith are very clear and explicit about what happens to anyone
who commits suicide.
Prophet Muhammad said, "A man was inflicted with wounds and he committed suicide, and so God
said: My slave has caused death on himself hurriedly, so I forbid Paradise for him."
A few years ago, the Fiqh Council of North America reaffirmed Islam's condemnation of terrorism and
religious extremism by issuing the following fatwa, or formal religious ruling: "We have consistently
condemned terrorism and extremism in all forms and under all circumstances, and we reiterate this
unequivocal position. Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against
innocent lives.
"There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians' life and property
through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram - prohibited in Islam - and those who
commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not 'martyrs.'"
The Quran states: "Whoever kills a person unjustly, it is as though he has killed all mankind. And
whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind."
The closest reference to "72 virgins" comes from a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, "The smallest
reward for the people of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 companions, over
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which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from AlJabiyyah [a Damascus suburb] to Sana'a [Yemen]."
Even if it is an authentic saying of Prophet Muhammad, there is no reference to suggest that if someone
commits acts of terrorism they would be rewarded with 72 virgins in Paradise.
The reference "terrorists are rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise" goes against the nature and true
essence of the teachings of Islam. One cannot achieve paradise by committing acts of injustice.
Islam is a faith that adheres to peace and justice.
Yes, there are some who are misguided and commit acts of violence, but one cannot hold an entire faith
of 1.5 billion people accountable for the actions of some.
In Islam, people who commit good deeds are rewarded and those who commit evil deeds are punished.
Terrorists, all terrorists regardless of race, ethnicity or religion, will be and should be punished not
rewarded.
Nowhere in the Quran will one find, "Terrorists will receive 72 virgins when they die."
This stereotype about Islam and Muslims needs to be put to rest once and for all.
Altaf Ali is executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
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Article # 12 -Muslim charities, mosques get lessons on
fundraising
Goal is to reassure U.S. officials that money will never end up in terrorists' hands
By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah | Tribune reporter June 12, 2009
In an auditorium at Elmhurst College, more than 100 leaders of area mosques and Muslim non-profits looked to
an unusual mix of sources for help with one of their primary dilemmas since Sept. 11 -- how to fulfill the Islamic
obligation to do charitable works, especially abroad, without drawing the attention of the FBI.
The Internal Revenue Service, the MacArthur Foundation and a group of lawyers called Muslim Advocates were
on hand late last month to instruct the Chicago-area leaders in proper ways to report the collection of foreign
funds, keep bookkeeping transparent and otherwise reassure U.S. officials that the money they raise never will
end up in the hands of terrorists.
It was part of an effort among some Muslim groups to avoid the missteps of the past and do some housecleaning
after a period in which a series of federal crackdowns led to a chill in charitable giving.
The initiative has been inspired by a new generation of leaders and by what many Muslims perceive as a new
climate under President Barack Obama, who mentioned the issue of charity, or zakat, during his landmark speech
to the Islamic world from Egypt last week.
The Better Business Bureau is also involved. A number of Muslim organizations are signing up for a tough
vetting of their financial records by the BBB's charity watchdog arm.
So far, eight Muslim organizations have started the process. They include a mosque in Waukegan and the InnerCity Muslim Action Network, or IMAN, in Chicago's Marquette Park neighborhood.
"We figured if this helps government agencies feel secure that we're in keeping with best practices, then we're
game," said Rami Nashashibi, executive director of IMAN, one of the first local groups to sign up for the program
despite believing it was already doing things properly.
Over the last eight years, the U.S. Treasury Department has designated six U.S.-based Muslim charities -including three operating near the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview -- as supporters of terrorists, freezing their
funds. The Mosque Foundation itself neither received that designation nor were its assets frozen.
Dozens of Muslim organizations and their leaders have come under federal scrutiny. The issue arose again last
month, when a court in Dallas sentenced two founding members of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and
Development to 65 years in prison each for funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, a militant Palestinian group
that the U.S. has labeled terrorist but also does social work. The Holy Land Foundation had an office in the
Chicago area and was once the nation's largest Muslim charity.
Yet Muslim leaders say they are encouraged by the Obama administration's tone. In Cairo, the president called for
a solution to the donations problem.
"In the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious
obligation," Obama said. "That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can
fulfill zakat."
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, said the Muslim community often was frustrated during
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the George W. Bush administration over how to resolve the charity issue, so she was surprised to hear Obama
address it last week.
"It was very gratifying to hear him make a commitment to the American Muslim community," Khera said.
The California-based Muslim Advocates group started four years ago, seeing a need for people trained in the law
to help Muslim organizations navigate non-profit regulations. Recently, they launched the Muslim Charities
Accreditation Program, offering "outside validation" through the BBB and conducting seminars.
Junaid Afeef, executive director of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, said many Illinois
institutions have asked for help. They have been concerned after seeing membership rosters and donations decline
as well as Muslims avoiding affiliations with religious institutions.
The FBI said cleanup efforts should come from within the community -- not from the agency.
"The idea that they're having this discussion internally about [fundraising practices], that's all we could ever ask,"
said John Miller, assistant director of the FBI's Office of Public Affairs. "It's all about due diligence."
Some in the community are skeptical. These critics insist that Muslim non-profits have always applied good
business practices. They believe Treasury officials linked charities unfairly to terrorism and closed them down
without due process.
But Khera of Muslim Advocates said Muslim non-profits need to do their part. At the Elmhurst conference in late
May, attendees from as far as Peoria and Milwaukee -- some running Islamic schools, others social service
organizations -- listened intently to the counsel.
When a lawyer stressed that U.S. non-profits need to look critically at foreign donors because the government is
looking for "money coming in to buy hearts and minds," they listened attentively. When a presenter called for
mosques to be more transparent by posting by-laws and records online, many cheered.
"This will really give a level of comfort for donors as well as other organizations who want to work with us," said
Muzaffer Sheriff, 57, treasurer of Islamic Foundation North, the mosque in Waukegan.
nahmed@tribune.com
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Article # 13 -Worker ID cards expected to stir up immigration
debate
Sen. Charles Schumer supports a worker ID card for all Americans. Business groups
warm up to the idea, but labor activists and the ACLU have concerns.
By Teresa Watanabe
June 16, 2009
As the immigration reform debate begins to heat up again, some observers expect that one of the biggest
and most controversial new elements will be a proposed national worker identification card for all
Americans.
A "forgery-proof" worker ID card, secured with biometric data such as fingerprints, is an idea favored
by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y), the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee. Schumer,
who will lead the effort to craft the Senate's comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation, called the
card the best way to ensure that all workers were authorized.
"The ID will make it easy for employers to avoid undocumented workers, which will allow for tough
sanctions against employers who break the law, which will lead to no jobs being available for illegal
immigrants, which will stop illegal immigration," Schumer wrote in his 2007 book, "Positively
American."
"Once Americans are convinced that we will permanently staunch the flow of illegal immigration, they
will be more willing to accept constructing a path toward earned citizenship for those who are already
here."
A Schumer aide said last week that the senator would probably present the worker ID card idea at a
hearing this summer on employee verification systems. The senator previously held a hearing on border
enforcement and plans to hold three more this summer -- on future immigrant flows, legalization of
illegal immigrants and worker verification -- before introducing a comprehensive bill in the fall, the aide
said.
The idea of a worker ID card is embraced by some business and community organizations. But it has
touched off fears among some labor activists and the American Civil Liberties Union about civil rights
violations and a "big brother" intrusion into private lives.
In his book, Schumer proposed requiring every American worker, citizen and noncitizen, to apply for an
identity card.
Some activists worry that any ID card proposal could divide the immigrant rights community between
those opposed to its perceived dangers and those willing to accept it as part of a compromise that would
legalize many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
"The bottom line is that this would be really expensive, really invasive and people will hate it," said
Chris Calabrese, counsel for the ACLU's technology and liberty project.
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Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, said she would
not want employers to control any worker verification system because they could selectively use it to
punish people advocating labor rights or union organization.
Immigration lawyer Peter Schey said it would be nearly impossible to monitor the nation's 26 million
employers for compliance with a worker verification system. As a result, he and others argue, the best
way to discourage illegal immigration is by strict enforcement of wage and hour laws, and by serious
penalties on employers who violate them.
Business leaders say they want to be sure they will not be saddled with high costs or liability for any
new verification system.
Some business groups have opposed the idea of making mandatory the system known as E-Verify. The
online system allows employers to check the citizenship status and work eligibility of new employees.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce spokesman Angelo Amador said employers never knew whether the
passports, driver's licenses or Social Security cards being presented were genuine. But he said anyone
presenting a worker ID card would be assumed legal, subject to confirmation by checking on a national
database.
"It takes away the burden on employers of being ID experts," Amador said.
Most activists say they are waiting for details before weighing in. But some say they may ultimately
have to compromise.
"At the end of the day, if we're going to achieve legalization of a major share of the undocumented, we
realize there will have to be some give and take over worker verification," said Mike Garcia, president
of the Service Employees International Union Local 1877 in Los Angeles. "We're not against it
necessarily if all of the other pieces of immigration reform fall into place."
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Article # 14 -Immigration reform to get a quiet kickoff
By Peter Wallsten
June 20, 2009
Lawmakers will gather at the White House next week for a working session on immigration reform, a
meeting that has been highly anticipated by Latino leaders eager for President Obama to honor his
campaign promise to put millions of undocumented workers on a "pathway to citizenship." But many
Democrats are now concluding that they may well not have the muscle to pass such a controversial
measure -- at least not immediately, and possibly not until after the 2010 midterm election.
And even though Obama used a Latino prayer breakfast Friday morning to reiterate his intention to pass
some sort of new immigration plan during his presidency, next week's gathering demonstrates how the
White House and congressional leaders are trying to strike a careful balance. They are seeking to
assuage Latino voters, who are a key constituency, while avoiding specific promises on timing and
substance, and while trying not to antagonize independent voters who may have a skeptical view of
legalization plans.
Obama, for example, slightly rephrased his immigration goals during Friday's remarks, saying that new
legislation should "clarify the status of millions who are here illegally, many who have put down roots."
"For those who wish to become citizens, we should require them to pay a penalty and pay taxes, learn
English, go to the back of the line behind those who played by the rules," Obama said.
The biggest obstacle to speedy passage of a citizenship plan, according to interviews with lawmakers
and Capitol Hill strategists, is the House. Democrats hold a wide majority there, but at least 40 members
represent moderate or conservative swing districts with few Latino voters where legalization plans are
unpopular and often derided as "amnesty" for lawbreakers.
"This a very, very difficult issue," said Rep. Jason Altmire, a Democrat elected in 2006 from rural
western Pennsylvania. "The Democratic Party is doing everything they can to capture this very fastgrowing community, and I understand that. But I'm not in that camp. I made it clear that I was going to
take a very hard line on this, and my district takes a hard line."
The White House has downplayed expectations for next week's meeting. According to Latino
lawmakers who met with Obama this spring, the president had indicated that he would host a summit
with lawmakers and advocacy groups, just as he did with healthcare leaders when he kicked off the
debate on that front-burner issue. Instead, the immigration event will be small and private and will
include only House and Senate members involved in the immigration debate.
Moreover, the White House is careful to point out that Obama wants to merely begin the debate this
year. He is not promising that a plan will be passed this year, although in his campaign he said he would
make the issue "a top priority in my first year as president."
Since then, Obama has made it clear that he has two primary legislative goals for the year -- a healthcare
overhaul and a global warming bill. Both proposals are already putting many swing-district Democrats
in a political bind.
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Still, some vocal Latino activists, led by Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), have pledged to keep applying
pressure.
Emma Lozano, an activist who is married to one of Gutierrez's congressional staffers, is organizing a
demonstration to take place outside the White House during the immigration meeting, and Gutierrez has
promised to tell demonstrators immediately after the meeting what the president said or did not say.
"We need to hear, 'This is what we're for, and this is the timeline,' " Gutierrez said. "This has got to
happen this year. . . . Everybody in the House and the Senate is waiting for a signal from the White
House."
In recent elections, some party leaders, including now-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, were
advising Democratic candidates in swing districts to steer clear of immigration, or take a hard line by
calling for stricter border enforcement and regulation of employers.
Surveys in swing districts presented to Democratic candidates by pollster Stanley Greenberg portrayed
support for legalization as a political risk.
But Obama's success with Latinos last year has prompted some Democrats to find a rhetorical middle
ground, as has the widespread belief that the party's political dominance relies in part on solidifying its
standing with the Latino bloc.
Greenberg produced new swing-district polling last summer to counter his earlier surveys -- this time
reporting that "a policy and message that focuses on requiring illegal immigrants to become legal
expands the Democratic advantage on the immigration issue." He said that pushing a "legal status
requirement" is more popular than simply talking about border enforcement.
One senior Democrat intent on acting this year is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who faces a
reelection campaign in Nevada, where Latinos are a fast-growing constituency. He has pledged to push
legislation in the fall.
But prior efforts have failed in the Senate. And with the measure's long-standing champions, Sens.
Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), no longer taking the lead, strategists say
that success is possible only if Obama steps in.
Some strategists believe the most likely time to press the issue will be in 2011, when Obama, once again
needing Latino votes to win states such as Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada and perhaps to
compete in Texas and Arizona, will be most motivated to lobby nervous Democrats on behalf of a
legalization plan.
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Article # 15 -LAPD names its first Islamic chaplain
Police leaders hope that the new chaplain, who has a history of building bridges between Muslims and law
enforcement, can help officers understand his community better.
By Duke Helfand | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2009
Sheik Qazi Asad prays five times each day. The Pakistani-born immigrant, who is now a U.S. citizen, first
got involved with law enforcement after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, working with the Sheriff’s Department.
(Jake Stevens / Los Angeles Times)
American Muslims have never been much of a presence in the Los Angeles Police Department, accounting for
less than 1% of its nearly 10,000 officers.
But now, with department leaders eager to improve relationships with local Muslims, top brass have named the
force's first Islamic chaplain: a Pakistani-born spiritual leader who has spent much of the last decade trying to
build bridges between law enforcement and Los Angeles County's diverse Muslim communities.
Sheik Qazi Asad, 47, will serve as a reserve chaplain at the LAPD's North Hollywood station. The volunteer post
requires about eight hours of service each month. But to Asad and his LAPD patrons, it represents an opportunity
to expose officers to a culture and faith that many may find unfamiliar, even foreign.
And that, Asad and LAPD leaders hope, will enhance relations that have been strained at times, particularly in the
aftermath of a much-criticized plan by the department in 2007 to map the city's Muslim population. The plan,
which some critics equated to religious profiling, was scrapped after a week of protests.
"We need to establish very good communication . . . where both parties are talking to each other," Asad said.
"This is just opening up the door."
Asad arrived in the United States at age 24, with virtually no money and speaking very little English. He learned
to speak the language by taking classes at Los Angeles City College and by watching the news on television. And
he learned a profession, the insurance claims business. Meanwhile, he began serving informally as a religious
advisor to other Muslims -- presiding over weddings and funerals, heading a nonprofit organization whose
members prepare the dead for burial, conducting weekly spiritual classes at a storefront office space in Inglewood.
He got involved with law enforcement after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
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Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca asked Asad to join a news conference at which Baca and other elected
leaders demonstrated their solidarity with the embattled Muslim community. Baca had met Asad in the 1990s at
dinners with elected officials and community leaders in the South Bay, where Asad lives.
The bearded Asad, a U.S. citizen, came to the news conference wearing traditional Muslim attire -- a turban, long
collarless shirt and trousers ending above the ankle. Soon after, he was asked to join Baca's Executive Clergy
Council. He brought about a dozen other American Muslim leaders with him.
Baca said that Asad helps establish a bridge of trust between Muslims and police. "It doesn't surprise me that the
LAPD would reach out to Qazi and give him a chance to continue his work," the sheriff said.
About two years ago, Asad joined an advisory panel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that included
representatives from the immigration service, Border Patrol, FBI, L.A. County Sheriff's Department and LAPD.
That's where he and LAPD leaders first talked about Asad becoming involved with the force.
"I asked, 'How do I become a chaplain?' " he recalled. " 'What are the requirements?' "
Like other candidates, Asad underwent an extensive background check that included fingerprinting, a review of
his finances and employment history, and an interview with the department's senior chaplains.
LAPD leaders view Asad's chaplaincy work as an extension of his previous roles with law enforcement. Although
chaplains are expected to serve in a nonsectarian capacity, LAPD authorities said they believe that Asad could be
a source of information for officers curious about Muslims and their religion.
"Officers don't know about Islam or Muslim communities in Los Angeles. He's going to be a person who can
educate them to that," said Lt. Mark Stainbrook, who oversees community outreach for the department's counterterrorism and criminal intelligence bureau.
Some Muslim religious and civic leaders who belong to an LAPD Muslim advisory panel grumbled privately
about not being consulted about Asad's selection, although they did not take issue with him. LAPD officials said
that Asad applied for the post on his own, and that the department generally does not run chaplain appointments
by outside advisory groups.
Even those Muslim leaders who voiced some disappointment with the process, however, said they believed that
Asad's appointment would help nurture an emerging relationship with the Police Department.
"The position needs someone who has the basic knowledge and skills to bring people together, especially
someone who understands the culture and nature of law enforcement," said Hussam Ayloush, Southern California
executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "I think Mr. Asad has such abilities."
Asad will spend the next six months working under two senior chaplains in the North Hollywood station. .
Asad said he intends to wear traditional clothing when appropriate -- for example, when presiding at the funeral of
a fellow Muslim. But he expects to show up most often in suit and tie.
He acknowledged that officers may be surprised to see him in their station.
"It will take time for them to adjust," he said. "I have to earn my stripes."
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Article # 16 -Fate of US-born kid of illegal immigrant
parents up in the air as Ga. officials weigh options
KATE BRUMBACK | Associated Press Writer
11:51 AM EDT, July 1, 2009
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — His mother isn't in the picture. His illegal immigrant father was deported.
Now, the 13-year-old waits for a Georgia court to decide his fate. Among the options: keeping the boy in the only
country he's ever lived in, but as a ward of the state, or sending him to his father in Guatemala, a country he's
never seen.
It's a tangled case that defies easy solutions. The boy is a U.S. citizen and says he wants to stay in his native
country. His father, a bus driver without regular work, says he would gladly take his child — though he agrees the
boy would be better off in the U.S.
But the teen has a history of behavioral problems, which make him hard to place with a foster family. His older
brother, who is 16, lives with relatives in the U.S. But they have other children and are unable to care for the boy
because of his problems.
A lawyer hired to represent the boy's interests says the state appears to be looking for a way to send him to
Guatemala against his wishes, a move she likened to deportation.
Beatriz Illescas Putzeys, Guatemala's consul general in Atlanta, said she usually argues for family reunification,
but in this case she is prepared to argue that the boy should stay here because he is a U.S. citizen and would have
access to better education and counseling.
"It is highly unusual, totally unusual," Illescas Putzeys said. "What I have been dealing with most of the time is
trying to get children sent back to Guatemala to their families."
The boy was born in Los Angeles in December 1995 to illegal immigrants — a father from Guatemala and a
mother from El Salvador. His mother later abandoned the family and her whereabouts are unknown, according to
Rebeca Salmon, a lawyer hired by the boy's court-appointed guardian. The boy's father, Edgar Ovidio Juares, 40,
was arrested in June 2007 and deported to Guatemala last year, he told a lawyer in Guatemala.
In a recent phone interview with The Associated Press, Juares was conflicted about his son's fate. He said he
wanted to have his son in Guatemala with him, but acknowledged the boy's quality of life would be better in the
U.S.
"I don't want to lose contact with my son," he said, speaking in a mix of Spanish and English. "I want him here,
but here it is hard to help him with the problems he has because we don't have much money.
"He said to me he doesn't want to come here," Juares said.
Salmon asked the AP not to identify the boy to protect his privacy. The case is being handled in Gwinnett County
Juvenile Court, and juvenile cases are generally sealed to protect the child.
Salmon said she was hired by the boy's court-appointed guardian who believes the state plans to ask the court to
send him to his father. She does not believe that is best for the child. The Associated Press has filed a motion
seeking to open the court proceedings to the media to hear the discussion about what is in the child's best interest.
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The boy has been in foster care since his father's arrest and has been moved from one home to another, nine in all,
over about two years, Salmon said. She described him as rebellious and said he needs counseling. He now lives in
a group home, but Salmon said she is seeking therapeutic placement for him. That would put him in a group home
or with a family that is trained to handle children with special needs.
"Instead of solving the problems he has, he's just been shuffled from one place to another, and now they're out of
places and they are trying to send him to a foreign country," Salmon said.
In an e-mail earlier this year, the state's Department of Human Resources, which oversees the Division of Family
and Children Services, asked Guatemalan officials for a home evaluation for the family in Guatemala. An agency
spokeswoman, Dena Smith, declined to comment on the state's plans for the boy, but said its priorities for every
child are safety and permanency.
"Legally, we cannot talk about any open case of any child," Smith said. "Case plans are individualized and are
based on the needs of the individual child."
A Guatemalan official wrote a letter to the Georgia child welfare division in July 2008 stating that the boy's aunt
in Guatemala said he would be better off in the U.S. because of his "psychological and behavioral problems."
A more detailed home study was done in early 2009. A translation of the report provided to the AP says Juares
lives with his father, the boy's paternal grandfather, that both are interested in having custody of the child, and it
appears they can care for and protect him. But it also recommends the child's rights as a U.S. citizen, including
access to a better quality of life, be taken into account.
The report says the grandfather, who is 67, earns up to $616 a month farming his land and operating corn mills.
Juares earns about $18 a day as a bus driver but doesn't have regular work, it says. They live in a rural area with
access to "basic public utilities such as water, electricity, elementary and basic education."
Several family law attorneys consulted by the AP said the situation is essentially a child custody case. They said
that means the main responsibility of everyone involved — the courts, the court-appointed guardian and the state
— is to find the solution that is in the child's best interest.
A hearing scheduled for earlier was postponed and has been rescheduled for July 20.
Illescas Putzeys said she had been prepared to argue at the June hearing that the child not go to Guatemala. She
said she spoke with Juares before that date because her position as a consular official requires her to argue for the
rights of Guatemalan citizens. She said it was important for her to ensure that Juares did not object to her arguing
that the boy should stay in the United States.
"He says that he would like to be able to take care of him but he realizes he cannot," she said.
newsday.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-us-freeing-daniel,0,1818239.story
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Article # 17 -Immigration officers launch investigations of
businesses to check for illegally hired workers
SUZANNE GAMBOA | Associated Press Writer
5:25 PM CDT, July 1, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration launched investigations of hundreds of businesses
around the country Wednesday as part of its strategy to focus immigration enforcement on the
employers who hire illegal workers.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun notifying businesses of plans to audit their I-9 forms
— employment eligibility documents that employers fill out for every worker — the agency told
members of Congress in an e-mail Wednesday.
Immigration officers served "Notices of Inspection" to 652 businesses, the Homeland Security
Department said. By comparison, 503 such notices were issued to businesses last year, the agency said.
Businesses were chosen for inspections based on leads and other investigative work, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement said.
Employers are required to keep the I-9 forms and must check the authenticity of documents provided by
the employee. The Homeland Security Department said it would not release the names or locations of
the businesses that are being audited because of the ongoing investigations.
"ICE is committed to establishing a meaningful I-9 inspection program to promote compliance with the
law," John Morton, Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, said in a statement. "This
nationwide effort is a first step in ICE's longterm strategy to address and deter illegal employment."
President Barack Obama has said his administration's strategy for stemming illegal immigration would
focus on employers who hire illegal workers.
The Bush administration was criticized for deploying armed agents to raid businesses and arrest workers
suspected to be working illegally. Critics said the Bush administration did not do enough to go after the
employers.
The Obama administration has been trying to build its credibility on immigration enforcement to boost
the chances of passing an immigration reform bill in Congress. The administration has doubted whether
it has enough votes right now to pass immigration reform. But some members of Congress emerged
from a meeting with Obama last week saying immigration reform could be done by the end of the year
or early next year.
The I-9 audits are certain to cause concern among employers who have complained that identifying
illegal workers is fraught with problems, from recognizing fake identity documents made to look
authentic to risking violating anti-discrimination laws.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said investigations will focus on businesses that
knowingly hire immigrants who cannot legally work in the U.S.
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Audits could turn up a range of issues from easily corrected paperwork problems to administrative
violations to violations that result in criminal charges. Depending on what is found, if anything,
employers could face various punishments such as fines, prohibition from federal contracting to
prosecution. Employees also could be charged with identity theft or document fraud.
"Employers want the rule of law. They want a level playing field, but it has to be combined with being
able to get the workers they need in a legal, reliable way. That's what we are looking for in immigration
reform," said Tamar Jacoby, president and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA, a national group of
employers who support immigration reform.
The group wants lawmakers to craft immigration reform legislation that will make it easier for
businesses to hire temporary workers.
ImmigrationWorks USA recently lobbied Capitol Hill on immigration reform. A handout distributed to
attendees was called, "Don't Wait for ICE to Knock on the Door." It gave tips for preparing for
immigration audits and work site investigations.
___
On the Net: Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
ImmigrationWorks USA: http://www.immigrationworksusa.org
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Article # 18 -How 1 immigrant high schooler soared, despite
detainment
HELEN O'NEILL
3:05 PM EDT, July 2, 2009
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — He was born on the Fourth of July, an irony he would learn to appreciate later,
during the dark period of his life, when liberty and freedom came to mean something far more real than
words in his high school history book.
Daniel Guadron has been fighting the odds all his young life, mostly as a happy warrior, winning admirers
and supporters at every turn.
It's not just that he excelled in school: The straight-A student mastered English within months of emigrating
from Guatemala at 13, then mastered French. He's aced every math test he has ever taken.
Or that he is blessed with a sunny nature, sparkling mind and ever-flashing smile.
Or that he shines on the soccer field and on the wrestling mat.
The handsome, crewcut young man has always possessed something more, a wisdom that radiates from his
deep brown eyes, a thirst for knowledge and for self-improvement, a clarity of vision about the nature of the
world, good and bad, and what he can achieve in it.
Everyone could see it — his teachers at Trenton Central High, his coaches, the running buddies who trained
with him for his first 10K race, co-workers in the restaurant where he works at weekends, even a lawyer he
befriended in the corporate building he cleans at nights. "Mr. Professor," the lawyer dubbed the cheerful teen
who swept floors even as he dreamed of becoming an engineer.
Daniel's guidance counselor called him "everyone's shining star."
And then, one chilly day in April 2008, the 18-year-old star disappeared.
They thundered into the inner-city row house at dawn, seven armed men shouting and banging doors, their
guns as prominent as the letters emblazoned on their windbreakers: ICE.
Daniel was in bed, but he knew who the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had come for — his
mother, Luisa, who had left for work a short time earlier. If you don't tell us where she is, he recalls them
saying, we will take you.
Daniel dressed silently. He was glad she wasn't there, his sweet, humble mother, who could barely speak
English, who worked so hard cleaning buildings, who cooked the best rice dishes in the world. She had
raised her children alone, showering them with love though they lived in a run-down section of Trenton and
had no money for luxuries other kids take for granted — cell phones, computers, cars. She had sacrificed so
much since emigrating from Guatemala in 2003.
Daniel would do anything for her.
And so, as neighbors peered fearfully from windows, agents handcuffed and shackled him and put him in a
van with a family from Costa Rica who had also been dragged from their beds. They drove 52 miles to
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Elizabeth, to a windowless warehouse on a bleak industrial strip near Newark International Airport. There,
Daniel was handed a drab blue prison uniform and locked up with 300 other immigrants.
"Why am I being treated like a criminal," he thought, "when I have done nothing wrong?"
It didn't take long for him to learn about the otherworldly universe of U.S. detention centers, where every
year about 350,000 asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are held indefinitely while the government decides
their fate.
Daniel knew that immigrants can be deported if they don't have proper papers. Plenty of illegals live in
Trenton, and he had heard horror stories about families swept up in ICE raids.
He was aware that his parents, who had separated years earlier, had been working with a lawyer to sort out
the family's legal status.
Still, he couldn't understand why he was being punished for their mistakes. After all, he had a Social Security
number and legal permission to study and work while the family's case was pending.
His mother sobbed over the phone, promising the lawyer would do everything to free him. A cousin assured
him that he would get out in a few days.
But as the days passed into weeks, Daniel began to despair. He ached for his soccer buddies, his books, his
mom. The rules said he couldn't have his text books because they were hardbacks.
His family couldn't visit because they feared being locked up, too.
Everything about the prison-like setting seemed so dehumanizing, so surreal — from the thin, wooden board
that served as his bed, to the fact that guards called him by his bunk number, H-38, not his name.
But what horrified Daniel most was the hopelessness he saw all around — the haunted, crushed looks of
people with nothing to do except fear the future and wonder if they would ever be free. Thank God, he
thought, they took me and not my mother.
He stumbled through the first week in shock, playing cards and dominos with the family from Costa Rica.
But they were deported after 10 days. Others disappeared regularly. In time, Daniel began to fear the
unimaginable: Could he be deported, too?
He yearned for fresh air: The "outdoor recreation" area was nothing more that a large room with a skylight
where detainees could exercise for one hour a day. He desperately missed school, especially math. He had
been so proud of scoring 96 in honors trigonometry, it made him miserable to think of falling behind.
In H dorm Malcolm Ikolo could see his young bunkmate deteriorating, losing weight, turning pale, his eyes
growing sad and dull. Ikolo, a 37-year-old marketing consultant married to an American, had been in
detention for two months, fighting deportation to the Congo. He had worked hard to find ways to stay
mentally strong.
"Work," he urged Daniel. "Read, exercise, pray. Keep as busy as you can. You are young and you are smart.
You will survive if you keep your mind busy and your body strong."
And so Daniel resolved to fill every second of every day, to wear himself out physically and mentally so that
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when night came he would be rewarded with the sweet escape of sleep.
He began working out with Ikolo, sometimes doing push-ups and calisthenics for hours. He practiced his
French — a language he loved — becoming a favorite of other detainees for his willingness to translate
documents and letters for them. He practiced yoga. He learned to breakdance, delighting dormmates with his
efforts to spin and drop and slide.
Even the staff were drawn to their youngest detainee, who won coveted jobs in the kitchen and the
warehouse. And, in a place jaded by indifference and despair, he won something more rare — kindness and
respect.
Everyone knew it was wrong — the student missing school, the son paying the price for his parents.
In the evenings Daniel would join the "storytime" sessions in the dorm, when men from Africa and India and
China would sit on bunks and sip tea and share tales of their countries and their families and their dreams.
My dream is to go to college, he told them. I want to become an engineer — a great engineer. I want to
design bridges so exotic that people will look at them and say, ah, that's a Guadron bridge.
Daniel told them of growing up in his grandparents' house in the country with vegetables and chickens and
flowers and of how he hoped one day to have a house and family of his own.
He described his initial excitement at landing in America, how shocked he had been by the run-down streets
of Trenton, how overjoyed by the blessing of school.
"I look strong here," he was fond of saying, flexing his biceps. Then he would tap his forehead. "But up here
is where I am really strong."
But it wasn't just friendships or determination or even prayer that buoyed Daniel, though every night he
clasped his rosary beads and asked God for the courage to get through another day.
What inspired his deepest strength was a book, a slim, earmarked volume he plucked from the ragged
selection of paperbacks donated to detainees. In the pages of "Night," Elie Wiesel's harrowing account of life
in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Daniel found reason to believe. The indignities and injustice he was suffering
paled in comparison to the evil that Wiesel had witnessed and endured.
Reading "Night," Daniel knew he would survive Elizabeth, that it wouldn't even be that hard, that he would
emerge stronger and bolder, maybe even a better person. And that one day he would tell the world.
Article 18.1
Back in Trenton, word spread quickly. It echoed through the corridors and classrooms of Trenton Central
High: "They've taken Daniel."
In her second-floor classroom, English as a Second Language teacher Iseult Leger choked back tears
thinking of the teenager who had captivated her from the moment he arrived. "It was heartbreaking to think
of him wasting his mind in that place. Daniel, of all students."
In her chaotic office, bursting with students and files and snacks, the normally ebullient guidance counselor
Miriam Mendez felt suddenly helpless and lost. In 23 years of teaching and counseling, Mendez had rarely
met anyone as deserving of a great education and a happy life. Now what would become her star, the one
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destined to graduate among the best in his class?
In the office building Daniel cleaned, lawyer Robert Lytle's heart sank when he thought of his "Mr.
Professor" behind bars. The 45-year-old former prosecutor knows prisons, knows how incarceration can
erode a person's soul. How could this happen, he thought, to a kid bursting with such personality and
promise?
In fact, immigration lawyers say it happens all the time, young people swept up in raids and locked up
because their parents brought them into the country illegally. According to the American Immigration
Lawyers Association, teenagers are routinely deported back to countries and cultures they barely know,
places where they last lived as infants.
ICE defends the practice, blaming the parents for poor choices.
"These are particularly compelling cases," spokeswoman Pat Reilly said. "But the parents made a decision
when he was a child. The Department of Homeland Security did not make that decision."
But even Keith Sklar, the lawyer representing the Guadron family, was stunned when Daniel's sister, Sara,
called him with the news: "They came and took my brother."
In more than a decade of practice, Sklar, who runs a small immigration law office with his wife, had never
had a client picked up in a raid. His first response was outrage. What on earth was the government thinking,
warehousing a high school senior, and a brilliant one at that?
His second was to file an appeal for parole, and to go to authorities at the Elizabeth detention center, which is
run by a private prison company called Corrections Corporation of America. There, he learned that Daniel's
arrest was apparently the result of some paperwork confusion; ICE said the family had missed a scheduled
court appearance and were therefore considered deportable and a flight risk.
As familiar as he is with the inconsistencies and seeming absurdities of ICE bureaucracy, Sklar was
incredulous. "Clearly Daniel Guadron is not a flight risk," he recalls telling officials angrily. "All he want's to
do is go back to school and graduate with his class."
But they refused to release Daniel.
In her tiny apartment on Hamilton Avenue, Daniel's mother sobbed uncontrollably as Sara pleaded with her
to be strong. "Mama, we have a lawyer. We are doing everything. We will get Daniel free."
But privately Sara, who was juggling jobs in a legal office and cleaning buildings while putting herself
through college, was terrified ICE would come for her, too.
Sklar had started working with the family two years earlier, trying to win legal status under NACARA, the
Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. The act provides relief for families from certain
Central American countries, including Guatemala, if a family member had been living here for years.
Because Daniel's father had emigrated years earlier, Sklar believed he could win legal status for the entire
family. The Guadrons had already attended several court hearings (a final decision in the case is scheduled
for October 2009).
On visits with Daniel, Sklar tried to reassure him. "Be patient. There is a good chance we are going to win."
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But, as months passed, Daniel was finding it harder and harder to be patient.
His letters to Sara all said the same thing: "Please get me out of this terrible place."
For all his efforts to be positive, there were days so dark Daniel broke down and cried.
There was July 4, his 19th birthday, when Ikolo donated his dessert — a muffin — as a birthday cake and
bunkmates sang "Happy Birthday." And the day his grandmother came to see him, the only family member
who dared because she was legally visiting from Guatemala. Seeing her Daniel behind a dirty glass partition
in the visitor's room, unable to hug him, permitted only to talk by phone, she wept.
He looks so pale, she told Sara. That place is killing my beautiful grandson.
But the blackest day was Sept. 7, the first day of school. Daniel couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't even
bring himself to work out. He lay on his bunk tormented by images of his classmates filing into classrooms
with their backpacks full of books. How would he ever catch up? Would he even graduate?
"I feel like this place is crushing me, that all my life and dreams are just being squeezed out of me," he told
Ikolo. "I feel so ... small."
Even Ikolo could find no words of consolation for his young friend.
___
"Pack your things," the guard said. "You are getting out."
Daniel's heart raced. Was he being deported or was he being freed?
In an office he signed a slew of release forms. As other detainees realized what was happening — that Daniel
was being paroled — the dorms erupted in cheers. They banged on tables and chanted his name.
"Good luck, Daniel!" they shouted. "Remember us, Daniel!"
At 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30, 2008, after nearly seven months in detention, Daniel stepped into the parking lot,
inhaling the cold, fresh air as if it was a drug. Sara was waiting. She had spent the day signing paperwork and
collecting donations from relatives to pay for her brother's $3,000 bail. Sklar had managed to reopen the
family's case and secure Daniel's release.
Tears streamed down both their faces as they drove away.
The Guadron family held a feast that night, shrimp and steak and rice, all his favorites. But Daniel couldn't
taste the food, couldn't sleep. He just wanted to get back to school.
When he strode into his school the next morning it seemed like the corridors were ringing with his name.
Classmates shrieked and clapped, teachers wrapped him in hugs, his counselor wept. "It was like I was a rock
star," he says, laughing at the memory.
But his joy was quickly tempered by a grim reality: Because Daniel had missed nearly two quarters, his usual
straight-A's had been replaced by zeros. His place in graduation would be affected, along with his prospects
for college.
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Worse, the one college he had set his heart on — the New Jersey Institute of Technology — said it couldn't
even process his financial aid application because he was not a permanent resident. At Mercer County
Community College he was told that he would have to pay full tuition, $3,824 a semester, unless he had a
green card.
Daniel's heart sank. His pay in the restaurant and at the cleaning job went toward his mother's rent and living
expenses. How could he possibly raise nearly $4,000?
What about my dreams of becoming an engineer, he asked Sara, despondently.
His sister stared at him in disbelief. "Daniel," she said, "you made it through detention. You can make it
through anything. People find ways to pay for their dreams."
___
Detention changed Daniel; everyone could see it. Sara jokes that it made him "nicer"; she laughs at how
considerate her brother has become, more willing to pitch in. His mother sensed a newfound wisdom, a
protectiveness and maturity that saddened her because she knew it came from suffering. And yet she
marveled, along with friends and teachers, at how his spirit had not been extinguished and how his
determination was as strong as ever.
At school Daniel quickly caught up, earning A's in every subject. He began running again, training for his
first marathon. He started a breakdancing group with friends. With the help of Mendez, he secured three
small scholarships, covering about half his tuition costs for Mercer. He hopes that by next year he will have a
green card and can transfer to NJIT.
But he would worry about that later. First, he celebrated.
On June 24, Daniel Humbarto Guadron donned a black cap and gown and processed with his classmates to
the podium inside the cavernous Sovereign Bank Arena in downtown Trenton. There, to the thundering
applause of several thousand onlookers, he was awarded his high school diploma. He had graduated 63rd in a
class of 456. It was the happiest moment of his life.
Outside the arena, Daniel's mother and grandmother and sister engulfed him in hugs. His 4-year-old cousin
leapt into his arms. Teachers congratulated him. Cameras clicked. Daniel beamed, thanking everyone, telling
them how grateful he was, promising to do great things with his life. "You will see!" he cried. "The world is
going to know the name Daniel Guadron."
Sara rolled her eyes. "You would think he had won the lottery," she said, laughing as her brother did a silly
little tap dance in front of her.
"It's better than winning the lottery," Daniel retorted. "Today is the start of all my dreams coming true."
With that, this irrepressible young man — locked up for seven months by the U.S. government and stronger
in spite of it — scooped up his cousin and went skipping and smiling down the road.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten, or redistributed.
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Article # 19 -NYC Muslims push to add holidays to school year
By SUZANNE MA
12:25 PM CDT, July 3, 2009
NEW YORK
Moneeb Hassan remembers having to choose between a final exam in American history or celebrating
the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha. In the end, he chose both.
Hassan, 17, is one of thousands of Muslim students in the city who must perform a balancing act
between his academic and religious obligations during his holidays. But the nation's largest school
district hasn't sanctioned official Muslim holidays.
"People came to this country for freedom of religion," Hassan said. "We're just asking for fair and equal
treatment."
Muslim activists lobbying to add the holy days to the school calendar -- which takes school off for
Christmas and the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- were heartened this week by a
City Council resolution supporting the observance of the two holidays -- Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
A handful of school districts in New Jersey and Michigan have recognized Muslim school holidays,
while efforts in Baltimore and Connecticut have failed recently.
New York City has the nation's largest school system. A 2008 study by Columbia University's Teachers
College estimates at least 10 percent of the city's 1.1 million students are Muslim.
Supporters say the school board needs to be inclusive of the growing number of Muslim students in New
York.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke out against approving the holidays this week, saying it would open the
door to other religious groups asking for days off.
"One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single
holiday there won't be any school," Bloomberg told reporters on Tuesday. "Educating our kids requires
time in the classroom and that's the most important thing to us more than anything else."
A day later, he sounded like he might be willing to give it some thought, saying that he would take a
closer look at the resolution. But he still stuck to his original point that honoring every religious holiday
isn't practical.
Eid al-Fitr, or the Festival of Breaking the Fast, marks the end of the sacred month of Ramadan. Eid alAdha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, is celebrated in the fall and commemorates the prophet Ibrahim's
faith in being willing to sacrifice his son.
The stress of catching up on school work, rescheduling exams and having to ask for special permission
to miss classes for the holidays is a routine Muslim students shouldn't have to go through, Hassan said.
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He remembers finishing his 7 a.m. history exam in just 40 minutes, racing out of the classroom, jumping
into his father's car and speeding off to the mosque. If the exam was later in the day, he would have
missed the morning prayer, a significant part of the Eid celebration.
City Councilman Robert Jackson, a Muslim, said he and a coalition of over 80 community groups in the
city will begin canvassing the mayor's office for his support for the holiday.
If Bloomberg isn't receptive, "we may have to consider legal action," he said. "Discrimination may be an
issue in this case."
Jackson said a bill that would mandate the holidays as state law has been introduced in Albany.
Susan Fani, a spokeswoman for the Catholic League, said she didn't oppose recognizing Muslim
holidays in public schools, but was concerned that Catholics and Christians in the city were not treated
with the same amount of respect and sensitivity.
"Catholics get a Santa Claus or a tree," but aren't allowed to display nativity scenes in school, Fani said.
"We just want to make sure that the enthusiasm that City Council is showing towards Muslims is the
same kind of enthusiasm they are showing toward Christians."
But others welcomed the idea, saying it is a chance for the city to extend an olive branch to the Muslim
community.
"The more we support one another in our spiritual quest, the better off we become as a society," said
Rabbi Michael Weisser of the Free Synagogue in Queens.
"Children are exempted from school during Rosh Hashanah. A fair minded person would have to agree
that our brother religion of Islam should have the same sort of benefit. It's an issue of fairness."
Copyright 2009 Associated Press.
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Article #20 Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: January 9, 2010
New York Times
Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they
went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained
and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people
were and how they died.
Nery Romero, who died in immigration detention in 2007.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
The family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of
government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail
of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union
under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the
Department of Homeland Security.
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The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of
privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it
tries to deport them.
But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how
officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of
mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after
gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a
spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from
government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the
reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid
embarrassing publicity.
In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility
concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old
detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other
detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the
detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect:
When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.
Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who
had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an
agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known
medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a
last resort.”
In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration
detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.
In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the
Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had
suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly
said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.
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But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the
reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar
Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an
ambulance was called.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in
Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and
the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the
discussion.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the
supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a
catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of
tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third
course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care
for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s
Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs.
Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to
monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee
health care.
Boubacar Bah, who suffered fatal head injuries in an immigration jail the same year.
Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t
recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs
office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not
comment.
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On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the
immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of
paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States
for a funeral and drawing news coverage.
Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he
added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr.
Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”
In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands
cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows
him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”
Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had
shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on
May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the
newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to
transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every
death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.
But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups
underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a
reliance on the agency to oversee itself.
“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris
Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal
operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.
The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National
Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard
procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.
But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public
information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a
Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled,
and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite
numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
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“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty
strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”
That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics
that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with
death rates in prisons.
Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency
was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly
before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to
disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a
list submitted to Congress last year.
Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by
the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other
immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement
was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those
deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.
According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008,
was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in
1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities
detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.
“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S.
Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”
In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging
from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly
of shoplifting offenses.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled
deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.
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