Committee For Justice

THE GOVERNMENT recently renewed its longstanding effort to deport a group of Palestinians in Los Angeles for their activism on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the mid-1980s. The government asked, under both a repealed Cold War-era law and the Patriot Act, that Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh be deported for raising money for the terrorist group and distributing its magazine. The case of the so-called Los Angeles Eight -- of whom Messrs. Hamide and Shehadeh are two -- has been kicking around the federal and immigration court systems for 16 years, going at one point all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In that time, it has become a cause c?l?bre among many Arab Americans and civil libertarians. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the case took on a different hue, as the task of making sure the United States is not a haven for terrorist fundraising acquired new urgency. But this bizarre case was never one on which the government ought to have planted the flag. Continuing it now only compounds many years of error.

When the government first moved against the seven Palestinians and one Kenyan, raising money for a foreign terrorist group was not a crime. Providing "material support" for such organizations did not, in fact, become a crime until 1996. And the government long ago admitted that had the Los Angeles Eight been citizens, there would have been no basis to act against them. So instead of criminal charges, the government sought their deportation on the basis of their alleged membership in an international communist organization -- because the PFLP professed Marxism in its vision of Palestinian liberation. But then, in 1990, the law that authorized deportations of communists was repealed, following court challenges. So to continue the case against Messrs. Hamide and Shehadeh, the government now must proceed under a repealed law or go after the two on the basis of conduct that violated no law at the time it was committed. It is doing both.
This might be justifiable if there were evidence that they were particularly dangerous people who are currently involved in threatening activity. But the government's court filings make no such claims. They don't even accuse the two -- both of whom now have families -- of having ever been actively involved in terrorism. Rather, they accuse them of having held fundraising events and rallies and having distributed magazines between 1984 and 1986.
The PFLP is a loathsome terrorist group. And the decision to make domestic fundraising for foreign terrorist groups a crime was an important policy change. People today who raise money for groups like the PFLP should be -- and are being -- prosecuted for it. But since Sept. 11, law enforcement has tried to emphasize that it is not conducting a campaign against Arabs and Muslims in the United States. And the government sends the wrong message when it goes after people living productive lives in this country for conduct committed more than a decade and a half ago that was, at the time, forbidden by no law. It only makes matters worse when the grounds for deportation keep shifting. It's time this case came to an end.