Campaign Action
Negah Hekmati said that after U.S. border agents released her family and allowed them to continue home to Seattle, her scared 5-year-old asked her “to stop speaking Persian, hoping that might help avoid further scrutiny,” The New York Times reports. The family had been held for five hours overnight, The Seattle Times writes, and were pressed with questions on topics ranging from members of extended families to social media accounts. “My kids shouldn’t experience such things,” she said. “They are U.S. citizens. This is not O.K.”
Hekmati and her family were among the Iranian Americans and Iranians detained at length and interrogated by Customs and Border Protection agents at the U.S.-Canada border over the weekend, a number initially reported as 60 people, as 100 by The Times, and as high as 200 by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. The Democratic legislator appeared at press conference on Monday with Hekmati, where she pushed back against the administration’s claim that there was no targeting of Iranian Americans. “DHS was the same agency that denied family separations were happening,” she said.
Denial or no denial, border agents’ reported questioning says everything about motives here. The New York Times reports that one person was asked about the Iranian high school she went to nearly four decades ago, while others, like Hekmati’s family, were also interrogated about their social media activities. Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told The New York Times that some of the questioning violated these families’ rights because U.S. citizens and legal residents can only be asked certain questions.
“United States citizens and legal permanent residents do not have to answer questions about their political views or religious views and practices,” she said, “and cannot be denied entry into the United States for declining to answer these questions.” Following reporting on the hourslong detentions and interrogations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reissued a “Know Your Rights” advisory and asked community members facing harassment from agents to contact the organization for assistance.
Of course, none of this should be happening to these Americans, and it’s clear why it is happening. “We see this at various points, especially when the U.S. takes some kind of conflict or warlike action abroad,” Shamsi said about the interrogations at the U.S.-Mexico border. “The deeply disturbing and painful reality for many people is that they then get treated like foreigners instead of the citizens that they are.”
In a message of solidarity, advocacy group Tsuru for Solidarity harkened back to the World War II era of mass detention of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government, writing that “Japanese Americans remember how wartime hysteria and racism led to surveillance, roundups of Japanese American community leaders, race-based curfews, and then to the wholesale roundup and incarceration of our entire community … War is no justification for discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. But it is a familiar excuse.”
