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INS Coverage
An immigration attorney advised me
of the case of Raza Ahmed, a 42-yearold
Pakistani man who was being held
in the Paterson jail. When I asked the
day before Ahmed’s hearing which
judge would be hearing it and when,
the court administrator said she was
not allowed to tell me. The following
day, on February 14, another Herald
News reporter and I tried to attend
Ahmed’s hearing. The immigration
judge said the hearing was closed in
accordance with instructions from top
Justice Department officials. One week
later, I was barred from observing the
immigration hearing of Malek Zeidan,
a 41-year-old Syrian national who had
overstayed his visa. The immigration
judge cited the September 21 Creppy
directive.
Within two weeks, the ACLU-N.J.
filed suit in U.S. District Court in Newark
on behalf of North Jersey Media
Group and the New Jersey Law Journal,
arguing that blanket closure of
special interest hearings violated the
public’s First Amendment right to open
proceedings. The judge ruled this
policy unconstitutional in May.
He also ordered the government to
stop enforcing the Creppy directive
nationwide while the case was appealed.
Justice Department lawyers
sought to have the order stayed, so that
hearings could remain closed while
they appealed to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.
The Third Circuit denied the
government’s request for a stay, but on
June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court
granted the stay, without explanation.
Later in the summer, in the case
stemming from Haddad’s closed hearings,
three judges from the Sixth Circuit
Court of Appeals in Cincinnati
ruled unanimously that categorical closure
of such hearings threatened democracy.
Soon after, in our case, a twoto-one
ruling by the Third Circuit found
in the government’s favor, concluding
that national security concerns override
the public’s right to open hearings.
The ACLU is considering an appeal
of this decision to the full Third
Circuit or to the U.S. Supreme Court
directly.
The importance of subjecting the
government’s anti-terrorism strategy to
public scrutiny was evidenced in the
case of Malek Zeidan. Federal agents
“discovered” Zeidan when they went
looking for his former roommate. He
became a special interest detainee and
was cleared of suspicion only after he
challenged his closed immigration hearings
in federal court. With two lawyers
and ample press coverage, Zeidan spent
a mere six weeks in jail before being
released on $10,000 bond. Without
the help of aggressive attorneys and
probing reporters, Zeidan might very
well have spent months locked up—
and no one, save his jailers, would have
known. ■
Until early October, Hilary Burke
covered immigration for the Herald
News, a 38,500-circulation daily
newspaper based in West Paterson,
New Jersey. She has since moved to
South America to work as a
freelance journalist. To track developments
in the North Jersey Media
Group, et al. v. Ashcroft, et al., visit
www.aclu-nj.org.
hilaryburke@hotmail.com
Challenging the Reporting Limits Imposed By the INS
For asking an ‘inappropriate’ question, a reporter’s access is curtailed.
By Mark Dow
During the 1990’s, I was working
as a freelancer in Miami,
covering the Immigration and
Naturalization Service’s (INS) Krome
detention center for the weekly Haïti
Progrès. Haitians made up the majority
of Krome detainees at the time—as
they do again today—but there was
also an international mix. Nigerians
had become a particular target of detention
officers’ discrimination and
brutality because these prisoners
tended to be politicized, assertive and
English speaking.
One Nigerian asylum seeker told me
that an INS detention officer had walked
into the men’s dormitory and threatened
sexual assault against him and
other prisoners. At least one other detainee
told the same story. I contacted
the public affairs office of the Miami
District INS to request a tour of the
detention center. According to the INS’s
own detention standards, media tours
are easily arranged, no big deal. In
practice, of course, public access is a
very different matter.
Public affairs officer Lamar Wooley
denied my request. He said that giving
tours to individual reporters would be
disruptive, but that when a pool of
reporters expressed interest we could
arrange something. Since Krome was
known for its cowboy-style operation
(the Miami INS would later be critized
by the Office of Inspector General for
its efforts to hoodwink congressional
investigators), it was not hard to find
reporters on the Miami beat interested
in touring the facility. Eleven writers
and photographers, including representatives
of The Miami Herald, New
Times, The Washington Post, and
Reuters, requested a pool tour. Request
denied. Spokesperson Wooley
explained District Director Walter
Cadman’s decision: “Nothing unusual
has happened or is happening to war-
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 11