Database manager caught in bureaucracy slept on concrete as guards harassed men

By COLIN FREEZE
The Globe and Mail
Thursday, December 26, 2002

Faramarz Farahani walked into a California immigration office thinking he was about to do his civic duty. He ended up being handcuffed, then flown to a crowded jail at the other end of the state, where he tried to sleep on a concrete floor in a five-day ordeal that left him bewildered.

"What is the American dream? I don't know any more," Mr. Farahani said in a telephone interview a few hours after being released. "I couldn't have imagined that in the United States anybody would be treated like this."

A Canadian citizen of Iranian birth, he is a database manager for a leading software firm in San Jose that enticed him to the United States two years ago. No one has ever suggested he is a terrorist.

None of that mattered to U.S. immigration officials, who focused solely on the fact that Mr. Farahani had been born in an Islamic country and was in the United States on a temporary visa.

In this respect, his profile resembles that of the hijackers who conducted last year's Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. That country now requires all adult males who were born in Islamic countries and who hold temporary U.S. visas to re-register in Immigration and Naturalization Service offices.

The new policy appears to have been poorly publicized and poorly understood by thousands of those affected -- and sometimes by INS workers. Mr. Farahani is among a dozen people, four of them Canadian citizens, who felt the brunt of this confusion after they walked into an INS office in San Jose.

When he went there early on Dec. 18, he thought he was doing a time-consuming chore. He had heard about the registration rule the previous day and wasn't sure if Canadians had to comply.

He had awakened at 5 a.m. to get the matter out of the way and get to work on time. But he found the office bogged down by scores of people trying to register.

After waiting several hours, he was told that he was already two days late -- the deadline had already passed for Iranian-born immigrant workers -- and that he would be detained until he could be processed.

"Would I have walked in if I was a terrorist?" he asks today.

Mr. Farahani was allowed one phone call to his family. Then he was handcuffed, tossed into the back of a van, loaded onto a plane under the eye of a shotgun-toting guard and taken to a detention centre in San Diego, 700 kilometres away. He slept in a crowded room on a concrete floor where guards woke the men up at 15-minute intervals, shouting questions.

He fought back tears as he wondered how he would explain the shame of his arrest to his two young sons. "Every time I talk to them I tell them about bad guys and good guys," Mr. Farahani said. "The bad guys are in jail. How do I tell them their father was in jail?"

After five days in jail, he gave up hope of a quick release: He and other prisoners heard that any judge who could release them was on holiday until at least Jan. 6.

But even then, outside the jail, his employers were working with another lawyer, Banafsheh Akhlaghi, to win the release of the prisoners. The Canadian consulate was also intervening.

On Monday, Ms. Akhlaghi had a long-awaited meeting with an INS official to discuss the cases of the San Jose men. Eventually, she said, there was an admission of bureaucratic bungling: "They were inundated with the number of people that came in; they were understaffed; they didn't have the procedures in place."

Late Monday, Mr. Farahani and some others were released, but the INS kept his passport. His wife made the long drive to pick him up. And he worries about other detainees: "What happens to the guys who can't speak the language very well?"