Two days ago, Dr. Wishwa Kapoor and his wife held an all-American Fourth of July celebration at their home in the leafy suburb of Fox Chapel, featuring 18 friends, copious flag decorations and a melting-pot menu with recipes from all over the world. A native of Afghanistan and an American citizen for 25 years, Kapoor said the food was for "signifying what this country is all about."

Too bad his older brother and his wife couldn't have attended, but they were snatched from their home in northern Virginia on June 22 by Homeland Security agents and tossed into jail for reasons that the feds have not seen fit to explain -- signifying what this country is not supposed to be about, but increasingly has been since Sept. 11, 2001.

If Dr. Kapoor, chief of general internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, hasn't been able to get his relatives out of jail, what hope is there for the thousands of other foreign nationals who present no threat but find themselves likewise detained under cover of the so-called Patriot Act, minus an influential relative to protest on their behalf?

At issue is the status of Gokal Kapoor, 70, and his wife, Shiela Kapoor, 69. According to the doctor, they fled Afghanistan in 1997 because, as Hindus, they feared for their lives under the Taliban, those self-appointed enforcers of a fanatical strain of Islam who later evoked America's wrath for hosting Osama bin Laden's training camps.

The family arrived in the United States and was allowed into the country under a claim of political asylum -- a status Dr. Kapoor says was granted many Hindus who fled that oppressive regime. Within the year, their case came up for consideration in Virginia, where the family went to be near Kapoor's sister and her family.

At that time, Dr. Kapoor claims, immigration Judge Joan Churchill made a bizarre assumption: She noted that the doctor was not present at the hearing, and therefore must have helped smuggle his brother's family into the country illegally. That made the application suspect, and asylum was denied.

In fact, the doctor was not present because he didn't know the hearing was taking place.

"My brother is very independent," Dr. Kapoor said yesterday. "He didn't think he needed to bother me with this." Had he known his presence was required, or even desired, the doctor said, he would have been there, just as one phone call from the judge would have corrected her specious rush to judgment.

"There was no evidence for what she said. She made it all up," said Dr. Kapoor. So the family entered legal limbo, caught between a dangerous homeland and an unforgiving host nation.

Released on their own recognizance, Gokal Kapoor and his wife got work permits. They found low-wage jobs at Dulles International Airport, he as a baggage handler, she as an escort for disabled passengers, and according to the doctor, never missed a day. They obeyed the law, paid their taxes, sent their son to school where he did well in his studies, all the while hoping for a reversal of the judge's decision.

Four years after denial of asylum, with the nation in the grip of post-9/11 jitters, the Kapoors were told their case was moot -- the Taliban had been ousted, so it would be safe for them to return. Dr. Kapoor vigorously disputes this claim.

"The Hindu temples were burned and destroyed and many Hindus were killed," he wrote in a June 29 letter asking help from Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. "Sending them to Afghanistan where there is no Hindu community and where religious hatred is still extensive is condemning them to possible atrocities ... including murder."

Two months ago, the couple's work permits expired. Then, on June 22 -- the day of their 19-year-old son's high school graduation -- came the knock on the door. Immigration police told the couple they were being taken for questioning and would return home in a few hours. For days, the family couldn't locate them. Were they dead? Deported?

Finally, a lawyer found them at Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, Va. They had not been questioned. As far as the doctor knows, they have not been charged with any crime.

The lawyer, Michael Maggio of Washington, D.C., called the Kapoor case "highly unusual."

"There are thousands of criminal aliens with final orders of deportation against them in the Washington-Virginia area," Maggio said. "Why, given the limited resources at the Department of Homeland Security, do they go after a 70-year-old Afghan man who's no threat to anyone and who faces being sent to one of the most dangerous countries in the world?

"And how are they going to deport him, anyway? The government there is barely functioning -- who's going to do the paperwork? There's no direct flight to Kabul, so they have to send him through a transit country, which means they'd have to send a U.S. agent to escort him ... does anyone think this is the best use of taxpayer dollars?"

For that reason, Maggio said, "I'm expecting and hoping all we have here is a government misfire, something they wish they hadn't done. I'm cautiously optimistic that once they have all the facts, they will release them from custody while they pursue asylum here or in a third country likeCanada."

Meanwhile, Dr. Kapoor is wondering how the country that has been so good to him could persist in such grievous error in his brother's case.

Wishwa Kapoor first visited the United States as a high school exchange student in Michigan in 1965. From there he traveled back and forth: two years of college in Kabul; a chemical engineering degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1970; back to Kabul to teach; once more to St. Louis for medical school; residency at the University of Miami; and then, in 1979, a position at Pitt, where he has been ever since.

"I have an enormous respect and admiration for how our country values human rights and is embracing of people who have suffered because of ethnic and religious persecutions elsewhere," he wrote in his letter to Santorum. "It is extremely distressing to me that my brother and his family ... are being deported and treated so severely in jail."

Santorum's office said yesterday it had made some calls on the matter but was waiting to hear back. Meanwhile, Eleanor Clift did a column on the subject for Newsweek's online edition, and the family has posted a Web site at www.stopdetention.org.

The last time Dr. Kapoor saw his brother was a month ago, at the family's small apartment in Fairfax. He is hoping against hope it will not prove to have been the last time ever. Yet he still expresses the faith that sometimes comes more easily to immigrants who've seen firsthand what else is out there:

"Despite all this, our country is the greatest country," he said.

In some ways, this is true. But in this case -- and in many thousands like it that we will never hear about -- it is not true enough, not by a long shot, not even close. .