Award-winning author and civil rights lawyer David Cole will discuss how foreign nationals’ rights have been compromised since September 11th, 2001, and what impact that may have on American citizens’ rights during an Open Society Institute-Baltimore forum on October 22nd.
Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who recently published Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (2003), will speak about the legal double standard applied to immigrants that has become more pronounced since the terrorist attacks. According to the 2000 census, Baltimore is home to approximately 30,000 foreign-born residents who may be affected by these sweeping new laws and changes in regulations.
“Measures have been imposed on foreigners that most Americans would find unacceptable if they were applied more broadly to U.S. citizens,” says Cole. “Yet, measures directed at immigrants in the name of security have often paved the way for the infringement of citizens’ civil liberties.”
Some of the measures taken against foreigners include:
- being subjected to preventive detention;
- secret arrests and secret trials;
- ethnic profiling; and
- searches and wiretaps without probable cause.
Also, sweeping new laws are encouraging guilt by association. Since 9/11, more than 100,000 foreigners have been subjected to selective registration requirements, interviews, prioritized deportations, and automatic detentions on the basis of their Arab or Muslim identity alone. In that same time, more than 5,000 foreign nationals in the United States—nearly all Arabs and Muslims—have been detained, but only three have been charged with a terrorist crime and of those three two were acquitted of terrorist charges.
“Baltimore is home to a large number of recent immigrants, many of whom came here to escape tyranny and injustice,” says OSI-Baltimore Criminal Justice Program Officer Aurie Hall. “Cole reminds us of past U.S. policies that targeted racial minorities in the name of national security. We must insure that they do not happen again."
David Cole is the author of Terrorism and the Constitution, No Equal Justice, and Enemy Aliens, which has been called “the essential book in the field” by former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey. He has two decades of experience defending immigrants in terrorism cases and is a legal affairs correspondent for “The Nation” and a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Cole was named one of the top forty-five public sector lawyers under forty-five by The American Lawyer.