Source: The Guardian
By Rose Hackman
Ahsan Samad sits on the sofa in the living room of his small family home in Brooklyn, New York. The 30-year-old plumber leans forward and carefully pours the coffee his mother has just brought in from the kitchen. His young niece and nephew are playing in a nearby room.
“I know I have done nothing wrong. I am constantly thinking about it. Their visits made me terrified.”
Samad looks up, bewildered and confused. He is trying to lay out the complexity of the mental hell the past four and a half years have been for him.
Samad is an American citizen with no criminal record – no arrests, no felonies. But in the shifting eyes of the American law, he is something worthy of seeming extra attention. Samad is not just American – he is also Muslim.
Over the course of more than four years between September 2011 and 2015, he received at least five visits to his home by NYPD and then FBI officers. He says the visiting officers came with no warrant and used threatening and provocative language. During a visit in September 2011, they even forced themselves inside his home.
He and his petrified family members repeatedly told law enforcement agents presenting themselves at his residence to arrange for interviews in the presence of lawyers (who later followed up with agencies) – something law enforcement officials repeatedly declined to do.
Follow-ups by Samad’s lawyers – members of a free legal clinic namedClear, which is operated by the law school at City University of New York – have not revealed the existence of any kind of formal investigation tied to Samad and his family.
Instead, the visits appear to be part of a larger tactic by law enforcement in the wide New York area, keeping tabs on members of the Muslim community online and offline, using a variety of implicit and explicit intimidating tactics.
The visits and threatening language have left Samad traumatized, verging on depression and deeply worried for his future.
This week, following the tragic and deadly attacks in Brussels that killed 31 people and wounded 250 people, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz called for the US to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized”.
As an example for the rest of the country to follow, the senator pointed to New York, where the police department launched a “demographics unit” after the 9/11 attacks. The at-first-secret unit, which was brought to public light by a Pulitzer-winning series of investigations by the AP in 2011, was in effect a domestic spying operation that sought to map out the residential, social and business landscape of American Muslims living in New York and the surrounding New Jersey area.
Crucially, according to the commanding officer of the NYPD’s own intelligence division who arrived in 2006 and testified in court on the matter in 2012, the unit’s activities led to no leads or terrorist investigations whatsoever. In other words, the program was seemingly ineffective.
Since the unit’s existence was revealed, its practices have been the basis for multiple civil rights lawsuits. Of note is the Raza v City of New York case, which was settled this January, having succeeded in prompting a number of significant changes and limitations in mass surveillance practices.
Categories: America, Muslims, The Muslim Times, USA
I certainly do not believe this article. The number of visits and threats from law enforcement and no warrants?! It doesn’t happen in America. They sue for everything. Guaranteed some Muslim organization would love a class action lawsuit to make some free money. That being said – the rest of us are under video surveillance – get used to it. And the rest of us don’t complain.
I agree with the poster above me. Muslims know they got CAIR on speed dial. The guardian paper has changed, it’s leftest ideology is now playing politics, I no longer use it for a news source