Then They Came for the Children
Feds Arrest Girls for Teen Snottiness
by Ted Rall
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0427-21.htm
They've vanished into the netherworld of a Homeland Security gulag and their story has already disappeared from the headlines, but the shocking case of two 16-year-old girls from New York City arrested a month ago ought to inspire outrage among every American worthy of the name. Since the government's reasons for the girls' imprisonment could apply to virtually any teenager, it should also spark fear.

Like many rebellious teens, I fought with my mother. Local police, called to my home during at least one particularly impressive clash of wills and voices, talked us back into the land of the calmly reasonable. Then they left.

Like many young people, I was fascinated by morbid, violent subjects. After I turned in an essay depicting a political assassination from the killer's viewpoint, my creative writing teacher sent me to talk to my guidance counselor. After I assured him that I had no desire to knock off any politicians, he returned me to class.

A quarter century later, my mom and I are best friends and I haven't done anything the Secret Service ought to worry about. Right now, however, two girls from New York City are rotting in a HomeSec prison in Pennsylvania for doing nothing more than I did--one for fighting with her parents and writing an essay, the other accused of being her friend.

In early March, the New York Times reported on April 7, one girl's parents "went to the local police station house" in the Queens Village neighborhood because "their daughter...had defied their authority." Things calmed down and the parents, believing their daughter had been scared straight, asked the NYPD to forget the whole thing.

It was too late for that.

Without a warrant, NYPD detectives and federal agents burst into the girl's home--no wonder they don't have time to look for Osama!--where they "searched her belongings and confiscated her computer and the essays that she had written as part of a home schooling program," say her family. "One essay concerned suicide...[that] asserted that suicide is against Islamic law." The family is Bangladeshi. They are Muslim. That, coupled with the mere mention of suicide bombing in her essay, was enough to put the fuzz on high alert.

Although she is conservative and devout, the girl and her parents vigorously deny that she is an Islamist extremist (not that such opinions are illegal), but this is post-9/11 America and post-9/11 America is out of its mind.

Based solely on an essay written by one of the two, the FBI says both girls are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to become suicide bombers." But the feds admit that they have no evidence to back their suspicions. Nothing.

"There are doubts about these claims, and no evidence has been found that such a plot was in the works," one Bush Administration official admitted to the Times. "The arrests took place after authorities decided it would be better to lock up the girls than wait and see if they decided to become terrorists," another told the New York Post. The same logic could be used to justify locking up any Muslim, or anyone at all. Heck, maybe that's the idea.

The Bangladeshi girl, who was homeschooled and wears a veil, says she never even met her outgoing and more Americanized "co-conspirator" from Guinea before the cops accused them of plotting to do...something. Maybe.

She says FBI agents threatened to deport her parents and place her American-born siblings, a four-month-old baby and an 11-year-old, in foster care unless she confessed.

Even in PATRIOT Act-era America, alleged fantasies of martyrdom aren't a crime. So HomeSec's ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is holding both two girls as illegal immigrants--one for entering the U.S. without an inspection, the other for overstaying her visa. And even that charge rests on razor-thin ice: "This is a girl who's been in this country since she was two years old," the Guinean girl's teacher says. Ditto for the one from Bangladesh. Holding kids accountable for the actions of their parents is crazy, which is why immigration authorities don't usually do it. Two-year-old babies don't wade across the Rio Grande or overstay their visas. Deporting American teenagers--American in every way that matters--to countries they've never even visited is equally insane.

I would be the first to applaud the FBI if they had arrested two proven would-be suicide bombers before they had the chance to strike. If they have evidence to that effect, they should make it public and bring charges in open court. But that's clearly not the case here.

When this story first broke I didn't write about it because I assumed that a public outcry would soon lead to its reasonable resolution. Sadly, this has not happened.

Homes searched without a warrant, kids thrown in prison for thoughts real and imagined, people's lives destroyed by an out-of-control federal government--will Americans speak up for what's right? Please call and write your congressman and senator to demand the release of the two girls from Queens.

© 2005 Ted Rall

Hmmm... I'm extremely pro-strict laws but I don't think those girls deserve to be thrown behind bars. I can think of a lot worse people in my school that haven't received NEARLY that much correctional work.

The thing about this..is that the girls have done NOTHING wrong whatsoever besides overstaying their Visa. They have been here since they were two. Suicidal thoughts? Hell IS for children. No telling how these girls are being abused. And we are the land of the free? Yeah right.



I love Ted Rall, by the way.

One of the girls has been released and the other will be leaving soon with her family.

Elation in Harlem as Girl Held in Terror Inquiry Is Released

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/07/nyregion...ed=1&oref=login

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: May 7, 2005

It began with two 16-year-old immigrant girls arrested at dawn, detained far from home, and, in a chilling government assertion, called would-be suicide bombers who posed "an imminent threat to the security of the United States."
Stephanie Keith for The New York Times

Adama Bah in her lawyer's office. She said she "cried a lot" while she was detained.

But now, after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one of the girls and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family.

One girl, an immigrant from Guinea, was back in her East Harlem high school yesterday among the jubilant friends and teachers who have insisted all along that the accusation was absurd. The other girl, who grew up in Queens, was still in detention, but was granted an order from an immigration judge that will allow her and her parents to return to their native Bangladesh as soon as the trip can be arranged.

Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed F.B.I. declarations, and orders barring the lawyers from disclosing government information. James Margolin, an F.B.I. spokesman, did not return calls seeking comment on the latest developments, and earlier had said he could not discuss the cases.

But Natasha Pierre, the lawyer for the Guinean girl, Adama Bah, said the outcome spoke for itself. "She should never have been detained in the first place," Ms. Pierre said of her client, who was not yet 2 when she arrived in New York with her parents, Muslims who have a trinket shop near a subway stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. "I'm still under a gag order and I have to be very careful not to cross the line. All I can say is she's innocent - she's more than innocent. The girl doesn't know anything."

The teenager's release came with conditions that Ms. Pierre said she was restrained from discussing. But the lawyer indicated that the conditions included Adama's being available to government investigators and reporting to immigration authorities. Her father, Mamadou Bah, a former cabdriver, is in a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., facing deportation for immigration violations.

Jessica Siegel, Adama's English teacher, was among many adults in the girl's life who had described her as a vibrant, popular teenager who wore jeans under her Islamic garb, ran for student body president, and hung out with the daughter of the PTA president, a Christian girl, when she was not baby-sitting for her younger brothers and sisters.

Her return was a joyful celebration. "She's seeing everybody, and she's smiling because people are jumping up and down and ecstatic," Ms. Siegel said in a cellphone call from school. "She's like a little bird that just got out of a cage."

Fellow students began laughing and crying at the same time when they saw her walk in, said a friend, Yolanda Lawrence, 15. Many had tried to send Adama letters of support, but were told that she was not allowed to receive or send mail in the maximum security juvenile detention center, in Berks County, Pa., and was allowed one five-minute phone call from her mother each week.

The gag order imposed by an immigration judge at the government's insistence seemed to be weighing on Adama when she emerged briefly from Heritage High School between classes. She repeated what she had been telling friends and teachers inside: "I can't talk about the case."

But by evening, in her lawyer's office in Brooklyn, she felt safe enough to talk a bit.

"I'm happy to see my friends, and especially my family," she said. When federal agents released her to her mother, in the family's apartment in East Harlem, "my mother couldn't stop smiling."

Her detention experience remains vivid, though.

"I cried a lot," she said. " You just feel depressed, you just feel like nothing when you're in there."

Asked if she understood why she had been detained, the girl replied, "Honestly, no." She added, speaking of federal agents, "They asked a lot of questions."

Ms. Pierre said she herself was at a loss to explain how Adama was swept into the investigation. She and the Bangladeshi girl, seized separately on March 24, were not even friends.

(Page 2 of 2)

Troy Mattes, the lawyer for the Bangladeshi girl, has also said that his client is no would-be suicide bomber, just a regular teenager devoted to her Islamic faith. Her name is not being published because she is a minor still in custody who has not been charged with any crime.

The girl's parents, who have lived in Queens for more than a dozen years, had their longstanding applications for political asylum closed administratively in the late 1990's, but had no outstanding deportation orders against them. In normal circumstances, they might have fought to legalize their immigration status.

But their daughter's detention changed everything, they said. When the general consul of Bangladesh pressed for an explanation of her detention, he said the Department of Homeland Security wrote last week that the girl, who entered the United States with her mother at the age of 4, was being held solely because she was in the country illegally.

In response, the girl's parents formally asked the government to let the whole family leave the country voluntarily.

Mr. Mattes said when he learned of Adama's impending release early Thursday, he tried for a similar arrangement for his client. "No dice," he said. Yesterday, an immigration judge signed an order allowing the whole family's departure as soon as a flight and passports could be arranged.

In the immigration case against Adama's father, deportation is all but inevitable, according to a lawyer who reviewed the records.

He was granted political asylum in the early 1990's, but under the false claim that he was from Mauritania, and lost asylum in the late 1990's when he was found driving a cab under a friend's hack license. Last year he exhausted an appeal to stay on the basis that deportation to Guinea would be an extraordinary hardship for his five children, four American-born.

But Adama said she hoped to make her own, separate case for staying in the United States, the only country she has known.

"I'm really happy that I'm out," she said. "I just don't want them to take me away again."