Guilty of Enforcing the Law
Al Hunt should make the case for why visa violations should be ignored.

December 6, 2001 1:15 p.m.

et's take an up-close-and-personal look at John Ashcroft's supposed crusade to curtail our civil liberties, which Al Hunt today compares to A. Mitchell Palmer's campaign to lock up radicals and left-wingers in 1919-20.

Hunt, in his bill of particulars, complains that the reason for Ashcroft's "unacceptable secrecy" in not revealing the list of current detainees is that he "is on a fishing expedition; if actual details, names and faces were made public, it might be embarrassing."

So, let's look at an actual name and details.

According to the Washington Post, Agus Budiman of Alexandria, Virginia, was arrested on a minor immigration charge in late October. Budiman expected to get out in days, because he had merely overstayed his visa, and was working when he was supposed to be a tourist.

Budiman is still in jail.

It turns out that he knew Mohamed Atta in Germany; that Atta's friend Ramzi Binalshibh — perhaps the missing 20th hijacker — used Budiman's address on his two (rejected) visa applications; and that he helped a man named Mohammad Belfas, who may be a bin Laden contact, to obtain an illegal Virginia driver's license.

Is Hunt outraged by Budiman's detention? If not, maybe that shows that fishing expeditions have their purpose.

And what about all the other nameless hundreds being held by Ashcroft? There are two categories.

If they are material witnesses (which means a judge has to be convinced that they have some connection to a criminal case), their names are kept confidential because grand-jury proceedings are private.

If, on the other hand, they are detained for a criminal or immigration violation — which is the case with the overwhelming majority — they have the right to counsel. Nothing would stop them from calling a local newspaper themselves to publicize their plight (or from having their lawyer or family do it). But probably most don't want to do it because they are embarrassed.

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that if Ashcroft had published a list of the names from the beginning, Al Hunt would be complaining today that Ashcroft had smeared innocent Muslim immigrants and created a "blacklist"?

The most important thing to remember in all this is that almost all of these detainees have violated the law, some of them by committing criminal offenses, the vast majority by violating the immigration laws. And the principal legal question here is not seriously in debate: Ashcroft has the power to detain aliens who have violated immigration laws.

The criticism of Ashcroft that was retailed over and over again during his confirmation fight was that he couldn't be trusted to enforce the laws. Now, these very same critics are accusing him, in effect, of enforcing the laws.

If Hunt is interested in making a substantive criticism of U.S. immigration policy, instead of just taking potshots at Ashcroft, he should make the case for why visa violations should be ignored, or for why U.S. immigration laws should be loosened in light of the way they are being enforced by the Justice Department.

Even better and more fundamentally, he can make the case for a civil rights revolution to extend all the rights of U.S. citizens to illegal aliens, so that they can never be detained or deported in this fashion again.

That would have the advantage of being an intellectually honest criticism of Ashcroft. Wonder why Hunt isn't making it.