Lawyers for the ACLU are appealing the ruling of an immigration judge who found a Jordanian college student deportable without first letting him testify or submit written evidence in his defense.

	Previous coverage La Roche student from Jordan is another victim of 9/11 (10/10/04)

The action violated Abelqader K. Abu-Snaineh's right to due process, asserted one of the lawyers, Robert Whitehill, who is pressing the case before the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals.

"An alien, or any person in the United States, is entitled to due process, a day in court and an opportunity to be heard," Whitehill said yesterday.

In June 2003, Immigration agents came to La Roche College in McCandless and arrested Abu-Snaineh, 22, for missing a deadline to comply with a now defunct federal program of special registrations imposed on men from mostly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Abu-Snaineh says his action was inadvertent, the result of being overextended with 18 college credits in spring 2003. But he and Whitehill say that when they arrived for a Sept. 15 hearing, Judge Donald Ferlise told them he already had decided that missing the deadline was a willful act and there was no need for testimony or written evidence.

Ferlise has offered no comment on the American Civil Liberties Union accusation. Elaine Komis, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, said her agency could not discuss why testimony and written evidence were not allowed.

Some observers of immigration cases have described the refusal to allow testimony as extraordinary.

"I've been practicing 19 years and I've been observing the field as an editor for the past eight years. This is a new one," said Daniel Kowalski, an Austin, Texas, immigration lawyer who edits the twice-monthly Bender's Immigration Bulletin, which follows immigration matters. "I've never heard of this happening."

Abu-Snaineh, who graduated from La Roche in August, wants to attend graduate school in America. But he said last week he planned to return to Jordan for now in light of the ruling. Under immigration law, leaving the country could prompt the government to deem an appeal of the case moot.