The registration includes being fingerprinted, photographed, and interrogated by immigration officials. Protests in Los Angeles in December at the time of the first deadline had shone a spotlight on the INS arrest of hundreds who were complying with the order to register.

"What they are doing to us is not right," said Rajh, who came to the New York protest with a group of Pakistani immigrants from the neighborhood around Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. "A lot of families are sitting at home while the men come to register. What happens if the men are detained?"

January 10 was the registration deadline for temporary residents who are citizens or nationals of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and north Korea. Immigrants from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are next, with a registration deadline of February 21.

Over the last year and a half immigrants from the Middle East and south Asia have faced stepped up harassment, arrests, and deportations, even before Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the special registrations. "Hundreds of cab drivers are being deported," declared Farooq A. Bhatti, president of the Pak Brothers Yellow Cab Drivers Union, one of several speakers from the Pakistani community to address the rally. Bhatti described the case of one driver who he had worked with for nine years who was detained recently. "Now he’s in jail in New Jersey and his family is in Brooklyn."

Many of those who joined the rally have been campaigning for the release of the hundreds of immigrants detained by the immigration cops without charges since September 11, 2001. Supriya David, a staff worker for Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) said that her group has been working with the detainees and their families. "There are groups of people that just disappear" from their communities, she said. In the INS jails they receive "no proper medical treatment and no proper food. They have 15 people in a cell."

Jeanette Gabriel, the organizer of the New Jersey local of the National Writers Union, said that her organization has called for the release of the detainees, many of whom are held in New Jersey county jails. "Conditions in the jails are so horrible that a lot accept voluntary deportation," Gabriel said. She handed out flyers for a conference of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Muslim-American writers, "Writing for our Rights: Writers in the Defense of Civil Rights," to be held at Rutgers University’s Newark campus January 25–26.  
 
 
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