How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?

Riding the nearly-empty subway to university one afternoon, Rasha accidently makes eye contact with a homeless man and “finds the connection rapturous.” Later, she writes about it in the notebook where she composes poetry and collects her favorite quotes: “his captivity reminded me that I was free.” Nineteen-year old Rasha and her family have just spent three months in prison.

Rasha is petite, modest, with the “hard fragility” of “a pessimist brimming with humanist hope.” Born in Syria in 1983, she moves to Brooklyn with her family on a tourist visa at the age of five. Syria is embroiled in violence under the authoritarian rule of Hafez al-Assad, so Rasha’s family quickly applies for asylum in the United States as her father works his way up at a discount clothing store in New York. Rasha asks her mother about Christmas and learns about her Muslim identity—while the family is not devout, Rasha’s mother instills “the simple values of honesty, compassion, and the protection of her honor” in her and her siblings (two older, three younger, including two born as American citizens).

In 1996, with their asylum applications stalling, the family returns to Syria; Rasha finds school difficult. They discover they have won a green card interview, but since they have left the United States, they have already lost eligibility. Instead, they manage to get a visa for a visit back to the United States, where they reapply for asylum. They move back to Brooklyn, which feels like home, seven months after landing in Syria. Rasha goes to James Madison High School and grows close to two other girls, Gaby from Ecuador and Nicky from Azerbaijan. After graduation, Rasha’s family buys a house in Bay Ridge; in September 2001, she begins college. On September 11, Rasha’s mother says she cannot go to school because the subway is broken—there has been an “accident […] with a plane.”

One night in February of 2002, Rasha is shaken awake by the police in the middle of the night to find her entire family arrested and fifteen officers occupying their house—an FBI agent explains that they are under investigation “for possible terrorism connections” and could be detained and deported. The family’s two younger boys, who are United States citizens, are left at home under the care of the men renting downstairs rooms. The family rides to Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in a windowless van and is thrown in a holding cell. There they are interrogated—the officers show them pictures of suspected terrorists and ask them about their past whereabouts and activities.

Years before, in Syria, Rasha learned to shoot a gun and worship the nation’s president in school. While her family was critical of Assad, she realized she could repeat their feelings in public and began to strongly value the freedom of speech she had in the United States. In the holding cell, Rasha’s father pleads to simply have them deported—instead, they are investigated and detained by the INS; a condescending officer tells them they should have expected this in “times like these.” The family is split up and sent to three separate detention centers.

Rasha, her mother, and her older sister Reem go to Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, where they are strip-searched, photographed, and locked in a filthy, overcrowded holding cell for six hours, and then in another holding cell for two days. Rasha’s mother manages to call her brother-in-law and explain their circumstances. They then end up in yet another cell and realize they are “going to be staying for a while.” Guards watch them constantly and their blankets are like “hairy cardboard.” Rasha is soon “extremely depressed” and feels powerless and suicidal, barely able to eat. Then she grows furious: she has not committed a crime but has “been abducted” by the state.

Rasha watches her mother pray and befriend other inmates. Meanwhile, Rasha grows closer to her sister Reem, with whom she shares a cell. The other women are Muslims there for similar reasons, Israelis and Russians there on immigration charges, and African-American and Latina women there on drug charges. Most have committed their crimes just for the sake of survival; unlike on TV, they treat one another with the humanity and goodwill they were denied by the government. But the abusive guards treat them like “a subhuman species.”

Gaby and Nicky are confused: Rasha has disappeared. A family friend of Rasha’s explains what happened, and they are all frightened. Luckily, Rasha’s family gets attorneys, but they are still miserable in prison—Reem develops a rash from the blankets, but the prison guards ignore her. After three weeks, the women are transferred to the same facility in Brooklyn as the men. Conditions are marginally better there, but Rasha begins to see her future fade away as she realizes “as a detainee she had no idea when she would be let out.”

Helping their mother keeps Rasha and Reem sane—when a tyrannical counselor denies her the right to call her son, Rasha’s mother is distraught, but the girls convince the man to permit the phone call. Rasha’s mother befriends an Egyptian woman brought to detention straight from the airport, even though she has a valid visa, as well as a Nigerian born-again Christian woman who gives her holy water that eases the pain of her gall stones. Once, they distract their mother from the sound of two inmates having sex nearby. When she starts getting letters from Gaby, Rasha realizes that “I’m being remembered.”

Suddenly, near the beginning of May, Rasha and her whole family are freed with no warning or explanation. An immigration officer tells them they have a court date, but also a valid case for residency. Outside, the sky is “glorious and familiar”—Rasha has not seen it for months. The family reunites at home and solemnly eats dinner. The next morning, Gaby and Nicky learn that Rasha is free; Gaby rushes over to Rasha’s house and they reunite in tears.

Rasha’s parents sell their house and she tries to explain to the dean of her university why she disappeared for three months. She feels freer than ever but hears constant talk about 9/11 and wants to scream, knowing the injustice of her situation. Nobody in the family talks about their experiences; Rasha’s older brother Munir, who was in a prison wing full of “violent abuses,” retreats from everyone. Rasha decides that she wants to be like the activists and lawyers who took up their case; she begins working on Middle East peace issues but cannot go to an international conference because of her undocumented status. She realizes how much “people take for granted being a citizen of this country.”

Unlike Rasha and her family, most of the people arbitrarily and indefinitely detained after 9/11 have no counsel to help them or family to support them. Many are deported in secret; human rights organizations like Amnesty International recognize that the U.S. government is widely violating basic human rights, but have no power to change the situation. Later, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General agrees, proposing that perhaps the government should seek “some level of evidence linking the alien to the crime” before randomly detaining people on the basis of race and religion. There are still no good statistics regarding the number of people arrested, but with the usual 24-hour limit on detention without evidence relaxed, the average victim appears to have spent about 80 days in detention.

This is not an unprecedented policy: the FBI interned more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry after the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941. The post-9/11 detentions were nowhere near as massive, but the parallels are clear: neither had any effect on national security, and both “exploited the jingoism and the racism of the moment.” Even one of the procedure’s orchestrators later admits that the detentions were mostly for “PR purposes,” so that the government could claim it was rounding up terrorists.

After the first wave of arbitrary detentions, the Bush administration quickly begins arresting Arabs and Muslims who “absconded” deportation orders—in practice, most either never receive their orders or are waiting for appeals. In one scholar’s words, the government is “blurring the distinction between alien, criminal, and terrorist.” The system lets people like Rasha sit in detention indefinitely, without having committed a crime, while both public and private prisons profit from their detention. Rasha’s experience leads her to pursue a career in human rights.

The weekend after her release, at dinner with her friends, Rasha is astonished to see the counselor who made her mother cry in prison sitting at a nearby table with his family. She goes up to him and, after he eventually recognizes her, he remarks that she has “cleaned up [her] act.” She explains that she never committed a crime, that he treated her mother disrespectfully, and that he is “a fucking asshole.” She is elated when she returns to her friends, satisfied to confront her jailer “on this side of freedom.”