FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 28, 2020
Media contacts:
Matt Adams, NWIRP Legal Director, matt@nwirp.org
(206) 957-8611
Imraan Siddiqi, CAIR-WA Executive Director, imraansiddiqi@cair.com
Brianna Auffray, CAIR-WA Legal and Policy Manager, bauffray@cair.com
(206) 367-4081
Seattle, WA – Today, the Council on American Islamic
Relations¬-Washington (CAIR-WA) and the Northwest Immigrant Rights
Project (NWIRP) are making public an official copy of a Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) directive that unlawfully directed agency
personnel to detain all Iranians at certain U.S. ports of entry along
the northern border in January 2020. The release of the document—as well
as a new, previously unknown version directing officials to ask certain
questions of detained Iranians—follows a court order by Chief Judge
Ricardo Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of
Washington. The Court concluded that the CBP had unlawfully withheld the
directive under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and ordered its
release. NWIRP is representing CAIR-WA in the case.
The release of the two different versions of the directive provides
official and unmistakable proof that CBP officials ordered agents on the
border to detain nearly all Iranians seeking entry to the United States,
and then subsequently denied they had issued any such directive to the
public. A copy of the directive was later leaked in late January 2020,
but CBP refused to confirm its authenticity, and publicly, officials
continued to deny that a directive ordering the detention of Iranians
had been issued. As previous records obtained by CAIR-WA and NWIRP show,
the directive resulted in the detention of nearly 200 individuals, most
of whom were held at the border for several hours.
In ordering the release of the directive, Chief Judge Ricardo Martinez
observed that release was appropriate because exemptions to FOIA “should
not shield the disclosure [of] records of illegal activity.” Under FOIA,
agencies are generally required to release documents to requesters,
unless certain exemptions apply. Chief Judge Martinez concluded that
here, the exemption that CBP claimed as applicable—which allows the
government to refuse to disclose law enforcement techniques or
procedures—did not apply because of the unlawful nature of those
techniques. Notably, as the Court observed in its order, CBP has not
even contested that the directive is in fact unlawful.
CAIR-WA and NWIRP have also recently obtained and are making public
today emails from Adele Fasano, the Seattle Field Office Director who
authorized the illegal directive. Many of these emails acknowledge the
wait times of several hours that detained Iranians faced. But they fail
to acknowledge that those wait times resulted from a blatantly illegal
directive that targeted U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents
based on their national origin.
“The Court’s order makes clear that the government unlawfully sought to
conceal illegal conduct, as the directive unlawfully targeted
individuals based solely on their national origin,” said Matt Adams,
Legal Director for NWIRP. “The directive that we are releasing today
demonstrates the need for greater accountability.”
“This event revealed how government agencies like CBP assume that by
invoking the magic words, ‘national security,’ they can get away with
discriminatory and illegal practices, and courts will uphold their
actions without scrutiny,” said Brianna Auffray, Legal and Policy
Manager for CAIR-WA. “With this decision, Judge Martinez has shown that
these words have started to lose their magic, and that blanket deference
to ‘security’ will no longer rule the day. What happened in January 2020
was wrong, and CBP’s cover up was an unsuccessful attempt to justify
depriving people of their liberties.”
CAIR-WA and NWIRP are now awaiting a further production of emails from
Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, whose emails the Court has also
ordered released.
Link to the Court’s decision
Link to the Fasano email FOIA production
Link to the Court-ordered FOIA production