The Michigan chapter of the the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a pair of federal lawsuits on Tuesday that take aim at the U.S. government’s use of secret watch lists and their affect on thousands upon thousands of innocent American Muslims.
The first filing, a 73-page class-action lawsuit, seeks damages on behalf of Muslims who have been branded on government lists as “known or suspected terrorists” without being afforded due process. In a second suit, CAIR asked a District Court judge in Alexandria, Virginia, for an injunctive and declaratory relief related to the practice.
“The terrorism watch lists are premised on the false notion that the government can somehow accurately predict whether an innocent American citizen will commit a crime in the future based on religious affiliation or First Amendment activities,” CAIR Legal Director Lena F. Masri, Esq. said in a statement. “Our lawsuits challenge the wrongful designation of thousands upon thousands of American Muslims as known or suspected terrorists without due process.”
CAIR’s attorneys said the government has prevented a huge number of innocent Muslim-Americans from boarding airlines, opening bank accounts and exercising their Second Amendment right to bear arms by adding them to secret watch lists established after the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that are impossible to be removed from.
“Through extra‐judicial and secret means, the federal government is ensnaring individuals into an invisible web of consequences that are imposed indefinitely and without recourse as a result of the shockingly large federal watch list that now include hundreds of thousands of individuals,” the class-action lawsuit reads in part.
“Persons placed on the federal watch list have no means of removing themselves or challenging the basis for their inclusion. Indeed, people on the federal watch lists only learn of their placement when they feel the web of consequences burdening their lives and aspirations, and they never learn why.”
CAIR’s attorneys filed the class-action complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of 14 plaintiffs who allege they’ve been affected by the government’s watch lists, including a 4-year-old toddler who has been labeled a terrorist since infancy.
“He was seven‐months old when his boarding pass was first stamped with the ’SSSS’ designation, indicating that he had been designated as a ’known or suspected terrorist,’ ” attorneys wrote of “Baby Doe.”
“The standards for watch list inclusion do not evince even internal logic,” the complaint states, and those affected “have no means of removing themselves or challenging the basis for their inclusion.”
The lawsuit alleges that 468,749 individuals were on watch lists as of 2013, and that “there are thousands upon thousands of potential plaintiffs making it impractical to bring them before the court.” Defendants named in the suit include more than a dozen officials employed by federal agencies including the Terrorist Screening Center, Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center.
Nearly all of the plaintiffs to sign on so far hail from Michigan, and the local CAIR chapter acknowledged that the city of Dearborn “contains the second-highest concentration of Americans on the federal government’s watch list.”
Despite having a popular of hardly 100,000, however, “Dearborn is among the top five cities in the country, alongside Chicago, Houston, New York, and San Diego, represented on the federal watch list,” the complaint states.
“None of these individuals were given notice. All are innocent, and none have been charged with crimes,” Lena Masri, legal director for CAIR’s Michigan chapter, told the Detroit News on Tuesday.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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