US Born Citizen and Airforce Veteran Prevented From Returning To The US

Rahinah Ibrahim is a Malaysian citizen and a mother of four.  She was in the United States legally, having arrived in 2001. On January 2, 2005 the PhD student in Construction management and Engineering at Stanford University arrived at San Francisco International Airport to board a scheduled flight to a Stanford sponsored conference, where she was to present the findings from her doctorate in her home country of Malaysia. She was wheelchair bound at the time, a complication of recent surgery.

At the airport she was handcuffed and taken to a holding cell by the TSA agents that had detained her. She was given no explanation as she was searched as to why she had been arrested. She was interrogated for several hours by the FBI and during the interrogation she was told she had been placed on a ‘No-Fly’ list. At no time was she advised why she was on such a list.

She was eventually cleared to fly by the FBI and told she was not a security risk, and she was assured there would be no further problems as she was sent on her way.

When Ibrahim tried to board a flight to come back to the USA however, there were problems, big ones. She was prevented from boarding her flight by local authorities in Malaysia who had been instructed by the US Consulate that she was barred from returning to the US.

Now, some eight years on she is still in Malaysia. She is banished, effectively in exile for reasons unknown to her.

This case is nowhere near being unique over the past 10 years there have been numerous documented cases of people holding legal residency status, and even US citizenship, being barred from returning to the US after taking a trip abroad.

Saadiq Long is a US citizen and a US Airforce veteran. He was banned from boarding a flight to Oklahoma to visit his mother who was in bad health and deteriorating daily due to congestive heart failure. American born and raised in Oklahoma but working in Qatar after leaving the Airforce an official from the Department of Homeland Security informed Long he was on a ‘No-Fly’ list and was not allowed to return to the country of his birth. After a massive public outcry he was eventually allowed to visit his mother. This man is a US citizen. He was born in the USA and had served in the military.

Of the 10,00 people currently on the US ‘No-Fly’ list, 500 of them are US citizens.

There is obviously a genuine and urgent need to protect the United States from terrorism, and to prevent such people entering the country, but the secrecy involved in the decisions that are affecting thousand of genuine law-abiding people, has no place in a modern democracy. It shows a major deterioration in constitutionally protected rights of Us citizens and those legally entitled to reside in the country.

The US justice system has been subverted and the erosion of civil liberties has increased in pace under Obama and it shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.