Welcome Home: The Story of My INS Detention

By Khalid Afsar

After nearly a month in Pakistan visiting my relatives, I was eager to come back home on January 24th. My Malaysian Airlines flight back was long (36 hours), and I was still recovering from a bout with the flu, so I was relieved to have finally arrived at LAX, just a short hop away from San Francisco, my final destination.

As I was approaching immigration and customs, I did not give it a second thought. I had traveled internationally many times before, and I knew the bureaucratic drill.

But this time was different.

I was happy to see that the line for US passport holders had just a couple of people, and things were moving fast. I got in line, holding my passport and customs declaration card, which I had already filled out on the plane.

My turn came, and I approached the female immigration officer at the counter. Upon looking at my passport, she asked me if I had a second form of photo identification, such as a driver's license. I told her that I never carried my driver's license outside the country. She insisted that I show her another photo ID. I told her I had some credit cards on me that she could check.

She then told me to stand aside and wait. Just a minute later, she asked me to follow her toward a man who wore a white shirt, holding a walkie-talkie and who seemed like her supervisor. He asked me if I had a second form of photo ID such as my California driver's license, my reply was "no, isn't the passport a photo ID?" He replied that anyone could have inserted a false photo in the passport (implying that I had tampered with the passport) and that I shouldn't be the one asking questions.

Stunned by his reply and frightened at what was to come next, I was then taken to an adjacent holding area. There at one end of the room was a counter behind which sat an Asian woman and a white man. Both seemed like they were in their fifties. The woman repeated the same question. "Do you have a driver's license on you?" I repeated the same answer: "no, I never take my license overseas." I told her I had some credit cards with my name on it, and she took those.

She then handed me a piece of paper and told me to jot down where I worked, a phone number, and at least two names there that they could contact. I did what she asked. I was told to then sit and wait. I anxiously waited for a while before being asked to come to the counter again. This time the man began asking me a series of questions: when did your stay in this country begin? What is your birth date, and your zodiac sign? What is your father's name, your mother's name? Who did you stay with in Pakistan, and what's his name? Who in your family sponsored you to become a legal resident, etc.? He wrote the answers down hurriedly on a plain piece of white paper that looked more like scratch paper than anything for record keeping.

I was told to take a seat, again. I waited for what seemed like forever. I looked at my watch and it was nearly 5:45 PM. I had been detained for nearly two hours now. Again, I was asked to come up to the counter, and again the man asked me another question: "where do you work?" at which point the woman sitting next to him interjected that she had already called my employer and checked. The man smiled and, assuming a polite tone, asked me about how hard it was to get a job with my employer and began making light conversation, handing me back my passport. I paused for a second and nervously asked what had happened. He said that I didn't have any form of photo identification on me. When I told him that I thought the passport was a photo ID, he smiled and said, "Oh no it really isn't." I walked away with a bitter sense of alienation.

Next came customs. Here I thought, having had spent two hours with the immigration folks, I would hand my customs declaration card to an officer and zoom right through. Not so.

I approached the man who was checking the declaration cards, an African-American male in his forties. He looked carefully at my face, looked at my passport, and told me to go to the inspection counter. I quickly proceeded to that counter and noticed that there was no line. There was this one Pakistani couple with one of the inspectors having their luggage opened and searched. And I saw a well-dressed white passenger talking to another inspector and filling out some forms.

A customs officer approached me and asked me to follow him to his counter. He told me to unlock my carry-on backpack, which I quickly did. He asked me where I worked and how long was my vacation as he began to look through the bag. He grabbed my personal journal from one of the outside pockets of the backpack and began to thumb through it, reading and taking in whatever was written on the page as if reading a novel. He muttered, "Is this your personal diary?" "Yes, it is," I replied. He then spent a few more minutes to slowly flip through the different pages from beginning to end.

When finished, he grabbed a book of short stories written by an Indian author, and flipping through the pages, he came across a hand-written note containing names and contacts of people I was hoping to call while in Malaysia. Next, he pulled out a white envelope with some brochures and loose pages; he inspected each brochure and piece of paper for content. I told him that I had a connecting flight to catch in less than half an hour. After a long pause, he motioned for me to put everything back in the bag and began entering something on his computer.

He then turned around and said to me: "I didn't really read anything in your diary." I asked if there was a new policy requiring a second form of identification besides a passport, and he said "no." I told him that the US Immigration people had told me that the US passport was not a valid photo ID. He answered: "I think they were lying to you."

I barely made it on to the United Airlines connecting flight to San Francisco, soon followed by a young woman whose seat happened to be next to mine. She told me how she had been stuck in traffic and almost missed the plane. I told her I had been in transit for over 36 hours only to be detained by the US Immigration and Customs people, whose new tactic was to harass US citizens fitting certain racial or religious profiles by questioning the authenticity of their passports, reading their personal diaries, and asking accusatory questions about whom they met on their foreign travels.

"How awful, I am really sorry," she said to me.

I finally made it home and felt sick to my stomach. I began to think about what would have happened if my flight had come in just hours later, when no one would have been at the office to vouch for me. Would they have held me through the weekend?

Does the mere fact that I am Muslim and have a common Arabic name give the government authorities the right to revoke my citizenship privileges and hold me without just cause?

I fell asleep wondering what was still in store for Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians in the coming phases of George Bush's war on terrorism.