POST 9/11 IMMIGRATION:
Multicultural Group Gives Hope for Relationship Between FBI; Muslim and Arab-American Communities
ON a recent Saturday morning in April, the FBI held a town hall meeting in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park Community Center.
 WATCH: For police chaplain and world traveler Danny Bundakji, the Multicultural Committee is a step in the right direction -- but not everyone is participating... |
For a society weaned on high-tension spy thrillers, the image of the FBI hosting a friendly bagel-and-coffee open discussion forum – under signs touting “environments that facilitate dialogue” and “relationships based on mutual respect" – doesn’t quite fit.
But there they were, the FBI’s top local brass, apparently ready to discuss touchy issues with community members from a number of religious and cultural groups – Muslim, Sikh, Bahai, Coptic Christians and others -- that have had big complaints about the way they’ve been treated by American law enforcement officials since 9/11.
“[The meeting] broke a psychological barrier,” said Abed Jlelati of the Free Muslims Coalition. He explained that community members needed to witness the progress made by activist groups in creating an open dialogue with a federal law enforcement agency.
“It’s a good thing,” said Kendrick Williams, FBI special agent in charge of hate crimes prevention for the Riverside Residential Agency. The town hall meeting shows the partnership between the community leaders and law enforcement, Kendrick explained. It lets people “deal with things face to face. People can see that you’re working on issues. … The biggest thing is establishing that dialogue,” he added.
 The Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee is a landmark grassroots effort between the FBI and representatives from a wide variety of religious and cultural groups... |
The purpose of the town hall meeting was to introduce the public to the Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee, a landmark grassroots effort between the FBI and representatives from a wide variety of religious and cultural groups that, after 9/11, all faced harassment, disrespectful treatment and even detainments – some lengthy and on-going -- as law enforcement officials went on full alert, desperately trying to investigate the acts of terrorism that still haunt our country today.
MCAC, participants say, has taken some of the sting out of still-festering post-9/11 wounds.
“Absolutely [MCAC] has helped,” said Hussam Ayloush, Executive Director of the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “In all fairness, it’s not a perfect process. It’s a process … I think the participants are very genuine from the Muslim community and from the FBI. Every time we have a difficulty or a challenge, we do have a process to help us face challenges, whether the ones we have today or the ones we’re going to keep having,” he added.
 View an interactive chart of the different agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security. |
MCAC is a “vibrant organization,” said Stephen Tidwell, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.
“The [member] organizations will call us if they feel like there's a problem regarding an investigation or how we conducted ourselves,” Tidwell said. “We have open dialogue, and they listen and also we have found that particularly regarding understanding of the various cultures, they've been very open in helping us understand how we can do things better, how we can do our job and how we can engage them in being part of the solution,” he explained.
But participants also say that in spite of the progress they’ve made, a major voice is missing from the MCAC table: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, was created when the Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2003. At that time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was abolished and split into two agencies under DHS – the law enforcement arm became ICE, and the client-interface arm became U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS).
Other DHS agencies include the Transportation Security Administration, visible at the nation’s airports, and Customs and Border Protection. For explanations of the DHS component agencies, please visit our interactive flow chart.
“ICE issues come up frequently [at MCAC meetings],” said Janna Evans, the regional lead of community outreach for USCIS’ Office of Citizenship and an MCAC participant.
Since MCAC’s inception, the Muslim community’s complaints about the FBI have dropped dramatically, Ayloush said. Today, “the main complaints are coming from the various agencies in the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security – TSA, ICE, the Border Patrol, and so on. These are the ones, unfortunately, where we’re having a problem,” Ayloush explained.
“We get complaints about people who are being detained, people who are being stopped at the airports for no reason, people missing their flights, people being waited for on their way back from an international flight..." |
“The abuses are happening on a daily basis, literally,” he continued. “We get complaints about people who are being detained, people who are being stopped at the airports for no reason, people missing their flights, people being waited for on their way back from an international flight, and then taken away and interrogated for two, three hours. That’s US citizens and quite often, obviously, visitors from Muslim countries. … I personally had to go through it with my family coming back from a vacation in Canada. Basically you are interrogated -- you, your wife, your children -- in a way that you are almost treated as a criminal.”
“It would be extremely helpful [if ICE were a presence on MCAC],” Evans said. “It may not be a particularly easy meeting, but it would be very helpful,” she said. As an example, Evans explained the success of the MCAC meeting when Ana Hinojosa, the CBP’s port director for Los Angeles, came to share the challenges of her job.
“I don’t think everybody agreed with everything she said, but it helps [the community] understand why we do or why they do what they do,” Evans said. MCAC is “a really good forum,” she added.
 Upcoming court cases raise questions about how effective MCAC can be in improving the relationship between the government and minority groups... |
According to Evans, Los Angeles’ new ICE special agent in charge has been invited to participate in MCAC.
“We have open invitations to those folks, to utilize it as a resource as we do and to build a foundation to stand on,” Tidwell said when asked about extending MCAC invitations to ICE and TSA. “Sometimes that’s a question of national policy by the organization, but we have a standing invitation to those folks.”
ICE representative Virginia Kice said that the agency does have an outreach program that has been in place for several years.
But Ayloush sees interactions with the law enforcement agencies of the DHS very differently.
“There is a very, very public relations aspect of the process,” he said. “It’s an office of civil rights and civil liberties where you just report cases, and you wait, and nothing happens.”
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This report was produced by:
Diana Day, William Etling, and Christina Wu.
(c) 2006 -- immigrationoutpost.com -- News21