Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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Also this issue: Play Missy for Me Over the Rainbow Sins of the Fathers Remembering Buddy Fisher Swims Free for Now |
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July 12-18, 2002
city beat
Paki-Slammed
 The Wrath of Khan: Mohammad Sardar Khan says the South Philly Pakistani community is under siege after half a dozen federal raids. : Michael T. Regan |
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A black Geo Storm is still parked in front of Shamim Khan’s apartment on the 2300 block of South Seventh Street. An American flag still flies above the passenger-side window. But Khan, who neighbors say owns the Geo, now sits in the York County Prison, detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), having been picked up by the feds in an early-morning raid July 3.
Khan was one of seven men detained in the federal action, the latest in a series of half a dozen since Sept. 11 that have Pakistani community leaders in South Philadelphia complaining that they are being unfairly targeted.
According to witnesses, around 6 a.m. a van blocked off the southern end of Seventh Street at Ritner in South Philadelphia. About 15 government agents swarmed the block, some with jackets reading U.S. Marshals, others FBI. According to Mom Kao, a Cambodian immigrant living at 2320 S. Seventh, a female agent approached, showed her a photo of a South Asian man and asked if she had seen him. Though the man was one of her next-door neighbors, Mom Kao says she told agents that she didn't know who he was. Soon after, according to Mom Kao and her live-in boyfriend, Kong-Sy Savath, three agents approached the apartment next door. One man held a see-through plastic shield and another held a gun, as a third agent kicked in the door. When one of the agents yelled, "They're escaping out the back," his partners, with Mom Kao's permission, went through her apartment and into her backyard, where they captured her next-door neighbors -- seven Pakistani immigrants.
The FBI's Philadelphia spokeswoman, Linda Vizi, is tight-lipped about the July 3 action.
"I have nobody under arrest," Vizi says, consistent with the Justice Department's post-9/11 policy of detaining people without arresting them, thus circumventing the rights of the accused under the Constitution. "If I have somebody under arrest, that's public-source information. There's no public-source information," which must be made available to the press.
The U.S. Attorney's Office and the INS have been more forthcoming.
Richard Manieri, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, says that only one of the men detained in the raid, Nadar Khan, was targeted by his office. According to Manieri, Nadar Khan is wanted in Texas on two counts of conspiracy to distribute heroin.
Nadar Khan bears no relation to Shamim Khan; Khan is a popular surname in northwest Pakistan, where the South Philly community has its roots.
Nancy G. Herrera, of the U.S. attorney's office for the southern district of Texas, based in Houston, says Nadar Khan has an identification hearing on July 12 in Philadelphia, after which he will be extradited to Texas for trial.
As for the other six men detained, INS spokeswoman Niki Edwards confirms only that "we did conduct a law enforcement operation on the third, and we did pick up six Pakistani illegals for being in an unlawful status."
Edwards is prohibited by INS regulations from detailing the specific violations or giving out the names of the detainees' lawyers. Because immigration violations are not a criminal offense, those who cannot afford legal representation are not entitled to a lawyer at government expense. In response to criticism from civil libertarians, the INS now provides detainees with a list of nonprofit legal defense organizations that may be willing to take their case.
Prison records officials at York County Prison confirm that the prison is holding five of the men who local Pakistani community leader Mohammad Sardar Khan claims had been captured. Sardar Khan has no relation to any of the detainees.
Victor Gill, who heads the Christian Voice of Pakistan and lives in the Northeast, says that the South Philadelphia community is being targeted because they grew up near the Afghan border in a Pakistani province where many Taliban and bin Laden supporters live.
Gill, a Pakistani Christian, knows firsthand the danger of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. He founded the Christian Voice of Pakistan in 1992 after a Muslim mob decapitated a Christian in his homeland. Despite this, Gill says, "I'm against terrorism, but I'm also against [racial] profiling."
Sardar Khan insists that none of the roughly 200 Pakistanis who live in the vicinity of Seventh and Oregon have links to al-Qaeda, but he says that since about 80 percent of the community is in the U.S. illegally, the authorities could pull aside virtually anybody and deport them for immigration violations.
"Our people are in a lot of misery because of this," says Sardar Khan. "People are scared to go out because of fear of capture."
Sardar Khan is a naturalized U.S. citizen, yet he has not complained to any local, state or federal authorities, fearing that "making a complaint will only make it worse."
The INS denies that it is profiling Muslim immigrants. "We do not base our investigations on nationality," says Edwards. "Our investigative priorities are illegal immigrants suspected in criminal or terrorist activities, people committing immigration fraud and people working in the country illegally."
Philadelphia immigration attorney Steven Morley doesn't buy it. Since Sept. 11, Morley says, "I have seen more Middle Eastern people being detained for lesser reasons. I have seen bond amounts ... reach astronomical levels that, as far as I'm concerned, defy reason."
Ahilan Arulanantham, staff counsel with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, says the July 3 incident in Philadelphia seems to fit into a larger pattern of guilt by association. "Anecdotally, we've definitely seen situations where the INS or FBI appeared to come for one person and then asked questions of other people and ended up picking them up also." According to Arulanantham, "The ACLU believes people should only be targeted for detention based on individualized suspicion that they've engaged in wrongdoing. We don't think the government should be in the practice of randomly targeting neighborhoods. To the extent the government is doing that, we find it troubling."
