Saturday, December 27, 2003

By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Abdelqader K. Abu-Snaineh expects to get a degree from La Roche College in August. But his excitement over that milestone is tempered by a more worrisome date on his calendar a month later.

That day is Sept. 15, when he goes before a judge to fight the government's attempt to deport him.

It's been six months since the Jordanian student became center stage in a debate over what, in terror-weary America, constitutes a harmless oversight or a threat to national security.

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Days after his 21st birthday in June, immigration officers led him away from campus in handcuffs and placed him in federal detention for failing to show up for special registration, a short-lived government program. Under it, males older than 16 from mostly Muslim countries were interviewed, photographed, fingerprinted.

His arrest was the first of its kind to surface publicly in Pittsburgh. To this day, people hold sharply different views on what the case illustrates.

Some said they have little sympathy for those who run afoul of laws intended to safeguard Americans, even if those accused are college students like Abu-Snaineh, with no prior transgressions. Others insist the government overreacted, noting that Abu-Snaineh was labeled a Level 1 security risk, even though he himself notified La Roche about the missed appointment and had sought the college's advice on how to make things right.

In interviews as he finished final exams this month, Abu-Snaineh seemed less interested in the debate over his arrest than in salvaging his dream of getting a job and a graduate degree in the United States, despite the government's attempt to have him removed.

"I'm not going to give up," said Abu-Snaineh, who is studying computer science. "People go through changes, hard times, but sometimes you have to be strong. You have to live up to what your family expects of you and what you expect of yourself."

He didn't tell his parents or two younger sisters about the arrest, saying they might worry or be disappointed in him. He hasn't seen them since late 2001, but can't risk traveling home to Jordan while the case is pending.

"If I go home, I'm deported by default," he said. "I can't get back here forever."

Nor can he apply for jobs with much certainty or be sure that he can actually enroll in any graduate school that might admit him. He has reluctantly begun considering backup options like doing graduate work in Canada.

"When you're a senior, you want to know what the next step is, you want to be able to prepare yourself," he said. "It's affected my life big time. It's affected me personally, socially. I want everything to be normal again."

Some things have changed since Abu-Snaineh's nine-day detention.

Earlier this month, the government terminated The National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, under which special registrations were conducted. And two federal court rulings called into question some aspects of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, specifically its handling of prisoners.

But Michael Gilhooly, director of public affairs for the eastern region of Immigration Custom Enforcement, said the elimination of the program doesn't change the fact that, at the time Abu-Snaineh was cited, it was in force.

While it was in effect, critics including civil liberties' groups argued that the program's focus on a subset of foreigners amounted to little more than religious and ethnic profiling.

Abu-Snaineh's lawyer, Robert Whitehill, said the program was poorly publicized and flawed. He said it snared someone who is the sort of foreign visitor the United States ought to embrace, someone with solid grades and a track record of involvement in campus activities from athletics to tutoring.

"He wants to stay here, in my opinion, for all the right reasons. He sees opportunities to better himself," Whitehill said. "It's hard to imagine many greater distractions on a student's intellectual activities than facing the possibility of being removed, not from the college or university, but from the country in which you are studying."

But those more supportive of the government's crackdown on foreign visitors argue a bigger issue is at stake than any one immigration case, or whether one government program had flaws that led to its demise.

After all, no federal program can be perfect, said Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"Are we bound not to act unless we're perfect?" he asked.

"Some of the Sept. 11 terrorists came here on student visas," Rosenzweig said. "If heightened American scrutiny has dissuaded people from coming here that's unfortunate, but equally unfortunate is the fact that some people have in the past taken advantage of our student visa program."

He's not convinced that a 10 percent decline in foreign students coming from Middle Eastern countries reported this fall by the Institute of International Education is necessarily the result of harsher visa rules, including the special registration program. He said the economy, for one, could have played a role.

But civil liberties groups, such as the ACLU, say the special registrations sent out a message, especially to those in Middle Eastern countries, that they were liable to be harassed in America.

"Regardless of whether he violated the registration requirement, is there any evidence that he poses a threat? It's not like he was fleeing," Pittsburgh ACLU Legal Director Witold Walczak said at the time of Abu-Snaineh's arrest. "He was taking 18 credits. He had at least a 3.3 average. They know where he is and what he's doing -- studying. Now he's a threat?"

Abu-Snaineh, who expressed gratitude toward the people who had come to his aid, was one of two Jordanians attending La Roche who missed the April 25 special registration deadline. The second student, Bassam Yasen, was not detained after turning himself in to immigration authorities and also is fighting a government bid to remove him from the country.

A calendar hearing will likely be held in April, but a hearing on the merits of the case has not yet been set.

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