The Militant - December 3, 2007 -- Deportation case against L.A. 8 is finally defeated

Vol. 71/No. 45 December 3, 2007

Deportation case against
L.A. 8 is finally defeated

BY NAOMI CRAINE
LOS ANGELES—“This is a victory not only for us but for the First Amendment of the Constitution and for the rights of all immigrants,” said Khader Hamide in an October 31 statement to the press. He was referring to the defeat of a more than 20-year effort by the U.S. government to deport him and seven others for their political activities. The L.A. Eight, as they came to be known, were targeted for their support of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination.

On October 30 the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed all charges against Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, the last two who faced deportation proceedings, after the government agreed to end its efforts to deport them.

Aiad Barakat, another of the eight, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen last year after federal judge Stephen Wilson rejected the government’s argument that he should be denied citizenship because of his political associations. The rest have gained permanent residency or are on track to do so.

The L.A. Eight—seven Palestinians and one Kenyan—were arrested in January 1987 and accused of being supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization that Washington brands as “terrorist.” They were originally charged with advocating “communism,” based on the thought-control McCarran-Walter Act. In 1988, Judge Wilson ruled key sections of the act unconstitutional and the Justice Department then moved to have the eight deported under immigration regulations.

Over the following two decades, the L.A. Eight won repeated court victories, but the government persisted in its efforts to deport them. “They never really had a case,” Hamide told the Militant.

“They investigated us for years, but [former FBI director William] Webster admitted in a Senate hearing that they never found criminal wrongdoing, and that if we were citizens we would have never been prosecuted.”

The political activities for which prosecutors said they should be deported included distributing newspapers, holding demonstrations, and organizing humanitarian aid fund-raisers for Palestinians. Among the legal victories won during the protracted fight were federal court rulings that noncitizens are entitled to the same First Amendment guarantees of free speech as citizens and that secret evidence cannot be used in deportation proceedings.

In January of this year, federal judge Bruce Einhorn again dismissed the case against Hamide and Shehadeh. He described the government’s refusal to turn over evidence favorable to the defendants in the case as “an embarrassment to the rule of law.”

“We had incredibly broad support,” said Hamide, including from civil rights organizations, churches, and in the Palestinian and Arab communities. “Practically every newspaper in the country wrote editorials supporting our case” including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. “These are not pro-Palestinian papers,” he noted. “They recognized that this represented an attack on the First Amendment, a chipping at constitutional rights.”

Marc Van Der Hout, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has represented the L.A. Eight from the beginning, said the government’s decision to drop all charges “is a monumental victory for all immigrants who want to be able to express their political views and support the lawful activities of organizations in their home countries fighting for social or political change.”

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home