The ‘L.A. 8’ Mark 10 Years in Limbo

On Jan. 13, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson handed the government another defeat in its decade-long crusade to deport me and the other seven individuals involved in what has come to be known as “the L.A. 8� case.

Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I would still be battling this case 10 years after it began on that nightmarish Monday morning of Jan. 26, 1987, when a battalion of federal agents backed by local police raided my Long Beach home.

Ibrahim, my son, then 3 years old, was sleeping next to me when a persistent knock woke me up. I went to check. It was 7 o’clock. Through the door’s panels I saw a man and a woman dressed in gray attire.

“Yes?� I asked.

“We’re from the Immigration and Naturalization Service,� the man said.

“We want to talk to you,� added the woman with a slight smile.

I felt uneasy. I had applied for citizenship 11 days before. Why are they here? Pushing my worries aside, I edged the door open.

A sudden, violent shove against the door sent me flying back. A horde of agents, weapons drawn, barged inside from their hiding places like a hurricane, shouting, “Where are the weapons?� Several agents seized me, sending pain throughout my body as they cuffed my hands behind my back and choked my neck with a wrestling hold.

I was taken to police headquarters, Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles. There, I learned that I wasn’t the only one detained in this “Dirty Harry�-style dawn raid. With another arrest a week later, we numbered eight, “the L.A. 8.� Deemed dangerous, we were detained for 23 days in a maximum security federal prison. We were charged under a McCarthy-era law, the McCarran-Walter Act, of supporting a terrorist organization.

The whole world has changed since that morning: The Soviet Union collapsed; there have been three American presidents; Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat stunned the world by shaking hands on the White House lawn. But the L.A. 8 case stood static. It defied time, logic and common sense.

The McCarran-Walter Act has been deemed unconstitutional by the courts and was eventually repealed by Congress. This latest court ruling in our favor was in response to the government’s attempt to use the new 1996 immigration law against us. Judge Wilson struck down as unconstitutional the law’s provision that attempted to strip the court of its authority to review INS actions.

Initially, we were charged with “membership or affiliation with an organization that distributes literature that advocates worldwide communism.� The organization was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the literature in question was available in bookstores and libraries across the country. This led to a court ruling that noncitizens have the same 1st Amendment rights as Americans, and that ours had been violated. Other charges against us--we denied them all--were similarly rejected. Last year, a new attempt to deport us was put on hold when we charged the government with selective prosecution. This case is still pending.

Today, 10 years later, 10,000 pages of material have been submitted by the government confirming that we had done nothing illegal, which Wilson noted in court Jan. 13.

No one knows how far this case will go. Not even Wilson, who has been on the case almost from the start and calls it “the never-ending saga.�

Meantime, the toll on our lives is multiplying. Each of the L.A. 8 now has a family. But none of us can be a normal family. The bureaucrats are continuing to make sure of that. They seem to enjoy the game, spending tax dollars for political witch hunts. A 10-year unjust campaign and 10,000 pages of meaningless material attest to this.

The American Civil Liberties Union designated this case as the “civil liberties case of the ‘80s,� a distinction our attorneys say will endure beyond the year 2000. Maybe this is a taste of what awaits immigrants in the next millennium? Maybe President Clinton will do better in the realm of justice in his second term? What is not a maybe is our determination to see this case through to prove that we have done nothing wrong, that we are being persecuted for nothing but our thoughts and political views.