Defending “Little Pakistan”
by
Lisa Mullenneaux
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood had attracted over 20,000 Pakistanis.[1] Retail grew up to meet their needs for traditional food and clothing, store signs and newspapers were in Urdu, and Pakistanis were proud New Yorkers, on their way to transforming the city’s taxi industry. But after 9-11 this 1.5 mile stretch of Coney Island Avenue called “Little Pakistan” was under siege. Women were afraid to wear the hijab and men to worship in the local mosque, Makki Masjid.
I was hearing stories of Muslims being unlawfully detained and took the train to Midwood in April 2002 to see for myself. I was quickly directed to a storefront, empty except for a young man who introduced himself as Mohammad Razvi. Razvi’s parents had immigrated from Lahore to Sheepshead Bay in 1980 when he was eight, but they soon moved to Midwood to be closer to the mosque. His father opened Punjab grocery, offering halal meat to residents for the first time, and Razvi often rang up their purchases.
“How has your community been affected by the government's response to 9-11,” I asked Razvi. He opened his desk drawer so I could see that it was full of house keys. “Many people here,” he said, “just gave me their keys and flew to Canada. Or another country where they and their families feel safe.”
I would soon learn that Muslims all over the US were being swept up in the FBI’s PENTTBOM investigation, an attempt to use immigration laws to detain “aliens” suspected of having ties to terrorism. Within two months of the attacks, they had detained, at least for questioning, more than 1,200 citizens and non-citizens nationwide. Many of these individuals were questioned and then released without being charged with a criminal or immigration offense. Many others, however, were deported for overstaying their visas. Even the Dept. of Justice’s own report The September 11 Detainees, April 2003, admits to the witchhunt: “We believe the FBI should have taken more care to distinguish between aliens who it actually suspected of having a connection to terrorism from those aliens who, while possibly guilty of violating federal immigration law, had no connection to terrorism.”[2] It also reported widespread physical and verbal abuse of detainees.[3]
The dragnet was followed in June 2002 by an announcement from Attorney General John Ashcroft of a Special Registration Program. Any male visa holder who was over the age of fifteen and a citizen of one of five Muslim countries—Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan—was required to report to an immigration office, where he would be photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed under oath. The program soon expanded to include visa holders from 25 countries, including Pakistan.
More than 83,000 immigrants nationwide were forced to register in a special database, essentially a Muslim registry,[4] because 24 of the 25 countries had large Muslim populations. The registry found zero terrorists, but the government still threatened 13,799 men with deportation.[5] Muslims who had applied for citizenship before 9-11 were told their background checks would take years, not the usual few weeks. Meanwhile, they couldn’t vote, study, or advance in their careers.
I returned to Midwood recently to see that Coney Island Avenue has been renamed Muhammad Ali Jinnah Way after the founder of Pakistan. Razvi, more gray now in his beard, confessed that what he and many of his neighbors thought was a temporary purge changed their lives—and the neighborhood—permanently. Their American dream became the American nightmare as residents were harassed by city and federal agents at work, at home, and even as they prayed. Razvi showed me a collection of business cards left in people’s doors by INS agents.[6] “Please call me ASAP” was handwritten on the back. “I need to ask you some questions.” Women came into Punjab grocery at all hours trying to find missing husbands and sons. One man slept in his car for four days, afraid if he went home he’d be arrested. In addition to federal agents, the NYPD spied on residents directly and through informers. To this day, Muslims are reluctant to report hate crimes because they fear it may backfire.[7]
Razvi created the Council of Peoples Organization (COPO) in November 2001 to answer the community’s need for advocacy and legal counsel. “I thought they would need my help for a few months,” he admits, but COPO has grown beyond just the needs of the Pakistani community. Razvi tells the story of his neighbor Tauqir Zafar, who was about to get married. “He went to visit his family in Pakistan and comes back, and they started putting him into deportation proceedings. We intervened … and you know, lo and behold — it took some time, but then they finally released him. Until today, he comes and visits me, and tells me, ‘Now I have kids, and living my American dream, thank you so much.’ Those are the things that I live for.”[8]
Another grateful COPO client is Shahid Ali Khan, who brought his family to New York City in 1997 because his two-year-old son needed open-heart surgery not available to them in Pakistan. Because of complications from that surgery, he and his wife wanted to continue treatment at Mt. Sinai and settled in Midwood. In 2003 Shahid was threatened with deportation. Razvi contacted local legislators and the media and Shahid was released. But in 2017, the whole family was put into deportation proceedings, a crisis featured in a New Yorker article, because Shahid’s the little boy still needed medical care. Working with COPO, the family was given a temporary stay.
In 2016 after ex-president Trump’s election, Razvi started getting panicky phone calls from neighbors worried about another siege of arrests and anti-Muslim hate crimes. Their fear was very real, but in 20 years, Razvi explains, he has learned to network with the NYPD and, yes, even the FBI, using politicians and the media to plead his clients’ cases. Not trained in the law himself, Razvi knows how to get a client free legal counsel from the New York Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, and Legal Aid Society. Today, he says, instead of making a million phone calls to county jails and law firms, he knows whom to call to get help. “But I’m also teaching what I’ve learned to others in free workshops. The most important thing that we can do is teach others, so the community stays strong.”
At COPO Razvi oversees 50 volunteers and a $4 million budget in a space that’s mushroomed to 20,000 square feet. A food pantry distributes food, not just to local residents, but to flood-damaged areas of Pakistan. And it all began, according to Razvi, with him watching his father at Punjab grocery give food to a needy neighbor on credit. Then when the neighbor got paid, so would his dad. “My father got people jobs or referred them to doctors. We were the neighborhood’s first social services center. People trusted us.”
Like Razvi, Ahsanullah “Bobby” Khan founded the Coney Island Avenue Project in the wake of the 9-11 attacks to support detainees and their families. Activism wasn’t new to Khan, who organized fellow students to stand against Pakistan's military regime in the 1970s. By 1995 Khan had emigrated to New York where he thought he’d escaped persecution. But in 2005, he was named a “person of interest” by the Dept. of Homeland Security, a stigma that would last until 2013.
“’A person of interest’, says Bobby, “is someone like Osama bin Laden. It is not me. The Dept. of Homeland Security started collecting information from back home, since there was nothing they could find that I was doing wrong in the US. They found out I was an organizer against the military regime in Pakistan. So what? That is my pride…. I came all the way from Pakistan to live a peaceful life and enjoy democracy and freedom of speech and expression, and that dream was smashed after 9/11.”
Khan’s Coney Island Avenue Project claims a 93% success rate in resolving legal cases and lists as its wins preventing deportations, raising funds for families of detainees, job placement, and a hunger strike that resulted in the closure of the Wackenhut Detention Center in 2005. Khan agrees the Muslim Registry (NSEERS) had a particularly chilling effect on Little Pakistan. Many of his neighbors chose to leave rather than comply with a program that wasn’t ended until 2011.
Ahmed Mohamed, CAIR-NY legal director and Khan’s colleague, calls NSEERS a shameful moment in American history. “After 9/11, this country really abandoned its basic principles of due process and equal justice under the law when it came to Muslims or individuals who were perceived to be Muslim, out of fear, out of Islamophobia. This impacted American Muslims in every way, especially in their daily lives, their ability to feel safe within their communities here in the US, their ability to practice their faith without being subjected to unwarranted surveillance or unfair and unequal treatment, and the NSEERS program was just one example of it.”
Today a neighborhood that was solidly Jewish (and Woody Allen’s hometown) flaunts its South Asian heritage. I pass women in shalwar kameez—a traditional Pakistani dress—and men wearing thobes and kufis. Warm weather brings vendors selling sugarcane juice from their trucks, squeezing the cane just as they do in Karachi. But for those familiar with the War on Terror, the rule of law will always be fragile.
BIO: Lisa Mullenneaux’s essays and poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New England Review, The Tampa Review, Women’s Review of Books, and others. She is the author of Naples’ Little Women: The Fiction of Elena Ferrante (Penington Press, 2016) and translates modern Italian poetry. She lives in Manhattan and teaches writing for the University of Maryland GC.
More at lisamullenneaux.com.
[1] The number is approximate because undocumented immigrants are not counted.
[2] The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of…. DOJ, April 2033, p. 203.
[3] Ibid., p. 9.
[4] The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) targeted foreign nationals from 25 countries based on religion, ethnicity, and national origin.
[5] Migration Policy Institute. “DHS Announces End to Controversial Post-9/11 Immigrant Registration and Tracking Program, May 17, 2011.
[6] The Homeland Security Act of 2002 disbanded the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), replacing it with the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
[7] CAIR-NY, Feeling the Hate: Bias and Hate Crimes Experienced by Muslim New Yorkers – September 2022, p. 21
[8] Center for Brooklyn History, Muslims in Brooklyn, Oral history, Mohammad Razvi, https://muslims.brooklynhistory.org/narrators/mohammad-razvi/
No comments:
Post a Comment