Letter to the Editor: Beware reach of gun searches

Today's Boston Globe carries a letter by Amy Reichbach, Racial Justice Fellow for the ACLU of Massachusetts.  It points out that the so-called "Safe Homes" program (which the Globe covered here), in which police go door-to-door and ask people to let them search their homes for guns, is "neither benign nor simply about gun collection."

News: Policy defines trooper role on immigration

The Boston Globe cites Anjali Waikar, our Equal Justice Works Fellow, in this article on the use of State Troopers to enforce immigration law.

News: State forsakes speech appeal

The Springfield Republican cites Bill Newman and Sarah Wunsch, attorneys for the ACLU of Massachusetts, in this article about the State dropping its appeal of a ruling that the Department of Education violated the free-speech rights of Alfie Kohn, a speaker invited to a 2001 education conference.

Press Release: ACLU rebukes U.S. Government for maligning South African professor

Group renews legal challenge, says U.S. should either substantiate claims of terrorist activity or grant distinguished scholar's visa

BOSTON -- In response to the unjustified denial of a visa to renowned South African scholar Adam Habib, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts today renewed their legal challenge to the Departments of State and Homeland Security.

The State Department refused Habib a visa after months of inaction, now claiming that he is barred because he has "engaged in terrorist activities" -- but the government failed to provide any evidence to prove its accustion. The ACLU, in today's legal complaint, is now demanding that the government either substantiate its ban on Habib or grant him a visa.

"In one fell swoop, the U.S. government has stifled political debate in this country and maligned the reputation of a respected scholar without giving one shred of evidence to support its claims," said Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. "It appears that Professor Habib is being excluded not because of his actions but because of his political views and associations."

"Our government continues to silence critics of U.S. foreign policy by labeling them as connected to terrorism. Time after time, we have later learned that the government can't justify these accusations. But in the meantime, reputations are harmed and our residents are denied the right to hear these voices," said Sarah Wunsch, Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Today's legal challenge amends a lawsuit filed in September in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit charges that the government's exclusion of Professor Habib amounts to censorship at the border because it prevents U.S. citizens and residents from hearing speech that is protected by the First Amendment. The ACLU went to court on behalf of organizations that have invited Professor Habib to speak in the U.S., including the American Sociological Association (ASA), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights (BCPR).

"The next meeting of the American Sociological Association will be held in Boston next August, and we want to make sure that Professor Habib is allowed to speak if he is invited again," said Wunsch.

Habib is a renowned scholar, sought after political analyst, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research, Innovation and Advancement at the University of Johannesburg. He is also a Muslim who has been a vocal critic of the war in Iraq and certain U.S. terrorism-related policies. Habib has repeatedly condemned terrorism but urged governments to respond to the terror threat with policies that are consistent with human rights norms and the rule of law. Until the government suddenly revoked his visa in October 2006 without explanation, he never experienced any trouble entering the U.S.; in fact, Habib lived in New York with his family for years while earning a Ph.D. in Political Science from the City University of New York.

The October 2006 revocation of Professor Habib's visa prevented him from attending a series of meetings with representatives from the National Institutes for Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank, Columbia University and the Gates Foundation. When he landed in New York, Habib was detained for seven hours and interrogated about his associations and political views. Armed guards eventually escorted him to a plane and deported him back to South Africa. The State Department later revoked the visas of Professor Habib's wife and two small children, again, without explanation.

"As someone who studies democracies around the world, it is deeply upsetting that the U.S. government refuses to allow me to cross its borders because of my political views. While I have criticized U.S. foreign policy as a political commentator, it is utterly absurd that anyone would associate me with terrorism," said Habib. "Although the harm the government's inexplicable 'terrorism' label has caused my family and reputation is very real, this is not just about me -- it is about protecting the free exchange of ideas that America is supposed to be about."

Last May, Habib applied for a new visa that would allow him to travel to the U.S. to attend speaking engagements. The government's failure to process Professor Habib's visa in time for him to attend the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2007, and the fact that the application continued to languish after Professor Habib received numerous new U.S. invitations, prompted the filing of the lawsuit.

Professor Habib's exclusion is part of a larger pattern. Over the past few years, numerous foreign scholars, human rights activists, and writers -- all vocal critics of U.S. policy -- have been barred from the U.S. without explanation or on vague national security grounds. In 2006, the ACLU filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of U.S. academic groups and Professor Tariq Ramadan, a widely respected Swiss scholar of the Muslim world. When the government revoked his visa in 2004, Professor Ramadan was prevented from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. The Ramadan lawsuit challenges the legality of his exclusion and the constitutionality of the Patriot Act provision under which he was initially excluded. He remains excluded from the U.S. to this day.

More information about ideological exclusion -- including a podcast with Adam Habib, plaintiff statements in support of Habib, and the legal complaint in today's case -- is available at:

http://www.aclu.org/exclusion

The ACLU recently launched a new interactive web feature that tells the stories of the artists, scholars and politicians the U.S. government has kept out of the country since the inception of ideological exclusion in 1952. It is available at:

http://www.aclu.org/passportflash

Attorneys in the case are Goodman, Jameel Jaffer, Nasrina Bargzie, and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU, and Sarah Wunsch and John Reinstein of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Letter to the Editor: The offensive costume at the ICE Halloween party

Nancy Ryan, Board President of the ACLU of Massachusetts, has a letter in today's paper about the "award-winning" costume at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement party on Halloween. The controversy seems to reveal a lot about ICE's true attitudes toward immigrants.

News: MassEquality: Moving Forward

Bay Windows mentions the ACLU in its story on the future of MassEquality. The ACLU of Massachusetts was a founding member of MassEquality, which led the fight against a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The amendment was decisively defeated on June 14, 2007, in a 151-45 vote.

Doctors, Torture, and War

A new study by Harvard Medical School researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance has found that U.S. medical students receive negligible instruction about military medical ethics and are ignorant about the Geneva Conventions.

It's a troubling finding in the wake of abuse scandals at military prisons like Abu Ghraib, and at a time when even the prospective U.S. Attorney General is being evasive about whether waterboarding -- making a captive believe they're drowning -- is torture.

Real IDentity theft

Whenever we talk about Real ID, the coming U.S. internal passport, we talk about the ways in which Real ID raises the risk of identity theft. Real ID will require the creation of massive new government databases of personal information, including Social Security numbers. Serious security breaches could compromise the data of pretty much everyone in the country.

To find out more about identity theft itself, check out the Massachusetts-based blog I've Been Mugged, named for the initials of its creator's former employer. IBM lost and exposed George Jenkins' personal information, and inspired him to start blogging about the issue.

Immigration Raids and Kids

We've been saying that immigration raids like the one this March in New Bedford have caused hardships for children, because their parents were whisked away with no warning. The National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute yesterday released a more detailed study which makes an even more compelling case. Among other things, the study found that for every two adult immigrants detained, about one child is left behind. Two-thirds of these children are U.S. citizens, and two-thirds are under age 10.