Happier times are now beyond Rae Alafyouny’s grasp.
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Rae’s pleas for her husband have fallen on deaf ears.
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Mo’s wife and stepchildren (Michael, 20; Angel, 9; Chris, 17; and Sara, 21) anxiously await his release.
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Coils of concertina wire surround the prison holding Mahmoud Alafyouny.
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An American Purgatory
Millions in U.S. aid reach the PLO each year, but a local man’s in jail because of the few bucks he raised for them 20 years ago
By SHOMIAL AHMAD and DAN MALONE
Rae Johnson Alafyouny had just begun her shift at Dallas Love Field, where she worked as a screener for the Transportation Safety Administration, when her cell phone started to vibrate. Over the years, she had worked a series of odd jobs to feed and clothe her five children, but this was the first job the 42-year-old had ever held that seemed to have any real meaning. “I never felt that being a waitress or a bartender that I did anything that really helped anyone,’’ she said.
After 9/11, when the federal government decided it would take over the screening of airport passengers and baggage, Alafyouny applied for a job and became a foot soldier in the domestic war on terror. “It was a job I thought was important,’’ she explained. It’s work she takes seriously, meticulously following even the most minor rules set out by the TSA. So when she showed up for work on May 14, 2004, she put her cell phone on vibrate and stashed it in a pocket. The TSA, one of 22 agencies that make up the newly created Department of Homeland Security, understandably doesn’t want its people taking phone calls when they’re supposed to be focused on keeping bad guys off airplanes.
When Alafyouny’s phone started buzzing, she asked a supervisor for permission to step away from her station to see who was calling. Her friends and family knew not to call when she was working. She reached for her phone and felt uneasy when she saw her husband’s cell phone number. He too was supposed to be working, at a tire store in Mesquite.
She called the number. One of her husband’s co-workers answered. “Their exact words: Homeland Security has taken your husband,’’ she recalled.
Federal agents had handcuffed and arrested her husband, 39-year-old Mo Alafyouny, on an allegation that he had violated the Patriot Act. He was hauled off from his place of work to a holding facility in Euless, then taken two days later to the Rolling Plains Detention Center, a privately run prison located on a desolate patch of farmland about an hour north of Abilene. And there he has stayed for the last 14 months.
Immigration officials accuse him of being an “alien who engaged in terrorist activity” — a charge that the Alafyounys are contesting, a charge that makes him sound like some kind of suicide bomber. But the specifics seem innocuous. As a teen-age college student in Jordan 20 years ago, Alafyouny, like many other displaced Palestinians, distributed fliers and collected money on behalf of other refugees for the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group that isn’t even on the U.S. Department of State’s official list of terror groups, and one that successive American presidents have dealt with — and even provided indirect funding for — for decades.
The Alafyounys were reluctant to tell their story. Both feared that publicity about Mo’s case could cost Rae her job and financially imperil the entire family. In the end, they decided that they wanted people to know what the government was doing.
“If nobody knows it’s happened, it keeps happening,’’ Rae said. “My husband is not a threat to this country. He’s not a threat to anyone.’’
Rae’s employers have full confidence in the job she’s doing — even though a sister agency within Homeland Security has branded her husband as a terrorist. Rae has been “very transparent’’ with the agency regarding who she’s married to and the accusations against him, said Andrea McCauley, a spokeswoman for the south central region of the TSA.
“We had discussions with headquarters and were very engaged in the process of working with her,’’ she said. “Our concerns are, ‘Are our screeners doing their jobs? Are they doing it with the right intentions?’” In Rae’s case, the answer is: “She’s a great screener, and we have confidence in what she’s doing.’’
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said that agency has no problem with Alafyouny’s wife working as a baggage screener.
“Whether Rae is qualified to work for TSA is a determination that TSA has made,’’ said Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for ICE’s regional Dallas office. “ICE has no reason to question TSA’s judgment on this matter.’’
Alafyouny is being detained, Rusnok said, because ICE plans to deport him if his latest appeal fails. He referred specific questions about the case to Alafyouny’s attorney, Joshua Turin of Dallas, who said his client has never been accused of any crime — much less one of violence.
“The fact that they’ve had him locked up for the last year is a farce,’’ Turin said. “There’s no evidence, nor has anyone ever asserted, that he’s ever done anything terroristic or threatened to. It’s like guilt by association. It’s kind of like the McCarthy era where anyone who ever went to a Communist meeting or even knew someone who had’’ was blacklisted.
Mahmoud M. “Mo” Alafyouny, according to interviews and court records, was just a year old when the Israeli military began to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. That year his family fled Jericho, leaving behind their home and the family auto glass business. His parents, grandmother, Mo, and five siblings crammed into one car and drove east to a new home and a new country —Jordan. Although he was too young to have any memories of his life in Palestine and of the chaos of the trip to Jordan, he grew up knowing that his family was part of the Palestinian diaspora that would indelibly color the politics of the region.
Millions of Palestinians fled their nation and settled in refugee camps in bordering countries like Lebanon and Jordan. The world in which Alafyouny came of age was one of statelessness, anger, and uncertainty, where young Palestinians who had no recollection of their homeland struggled to find ways to improve conditions in the camps and the Occupied Territories.
In 1983, as a college student in Jordan, Alafyouny collected money for the Palestine Liberation Organization. At the time, the organization offered social and medical services to Palestinians living in refugee camps, and Alafyouny, like many of his college-age friends, thought that raising money for the organization was like cutting a check for a UNICEF relief effort. For three years, he collected donations for the PLO, but once he began to suspect that not all the money went toward relief efforts, he dropped out. “I began to see that the people representing the PLO had new cars and nice homes, and still the Palestinian people did not have much,” Alafyouny explained. “I began to feel that maybe we were being used.” He said he doesn’t remember how much money he raised, except that it was in the hundreds of dollars. Even though his involvement in the PLO was limited, he said, he was repeatedly detained and questioned by Jordanian intelligence, which was afraid of the organization’s growing influence within the country.
Alafyouny finished a degree in hotel management and was hired as an accountant for a prominent Jordanian family. When a member of that family obtained a visa to work in the United States in 1996, the family sent Alafyouny along, thinking that his English-language proficiency would help their son, Hazem Qtaish. The two came to Miami, where Alafyouny found work delivering pizzas and Hazem got a job at a supermarket. Just a few months later, the store was robbed, and Hazem was killed. The robber escaped with only $10.
The Jordanian family who had trusted Alafyouny to take care of their son blamed Hazem’s death on Alafyouny. His acquaintances in Miami told Alafyouny his life was in danger, saying that the Jordanian family wanted “blood for blood,” and advised him to relocate as soon as possible. Alafyouny had planned to leave the U.S. after one year, when his visitor’s visa expired, but with the threats from the family, returning to Jordan was not an option.
Instead, Alafyouny resettled in Dallas near his brother, who had come to the United States a few years earlier. Fearing for Mo, the brother made what seemed like a perfectly reasonable suggestion: Mo should apply for political asylum. The brother himself had obtained asylum here, despite the fact that he had been more active in the PLO than his brother, having fought for the PLO.
A Dallas immigration judge, Carey Copeland, who would soon have immigration problems of his own, heard Alafyouny’s asylum claim in 1998. Though Copeland eventually rejected Alafyouny’s request to remain in this country, he seemingly went out of his way to laud Alafyouny and his brother, using language that made them sound like model immigrants. In a 10-page ruling, he described the pair as “appealing’’ three times. He called them “very impressive young men, obviously of high intellect and good education.’’ They seemed, the judge said, “to be very talented and bright and energetic.’’
Immigration judges are accustomed to improbable stories told by desperate people willing to say whatever they think will persuade authorities to let them remain in the United States. It is not uncommon for people to apply for asylum, citing fears of persecution, when they actually just want to stay in the country for economic or personal reasons. To sort the good cases from the bad, judges assess asylum requests based on such measures as whether the applicant’s story seems plausible or can be corroborated with documents or testimony from other persons.
In Alafyouny’s case, Copeland not only found his story credible and plausible but also noted that a police report submitted with his application backed up Alafyouny’s account of Qtaish’s murder. And the judge said that he was indeed concerned that Alafyouny “may well be subject to some considerable danger in Jordan.’’
Despite Alafyouny’s appealing nature and a credible story, however, Copeland nevertheless rejected Alafyouny’s request to remain in the country. Whatever mistreatment he endured at the hands of Jordanian authorities, Copeland said, sounded more like harassment than persecution, and his fear of retaliation from his Jordanian employer, while likely legitimate, was a “ purely personal matter’’ that didn’t qualify him for asylum. Alafyouny challenged Copeland’s ruling before the Board of Immigration Appeals — and went on about his life. His appeal was pending when he met the woman he would soon marry.
Rae Johnson was born in California, one of three daughters in a career military family. Her father, who died of stomach cancer, was a Navy SeaBee, and her mom, who now lives in Dallas, worked at home and part-time at the Navy base exchange. Rae married right out of high school, moved to Dallas in 1981, and had four children with her first husband. After the marriage failed, she had a fifth child with another man. By the late 1990s, she was finding it increasingly difficult to support five children with what she received in child support and earned by waiting tables or tending bar.
Rae and Mo met in 1999 at her youngest daughter’s daycare center. Mo was friends with the owner — and Mo and Rae became friends and fell in love. “He has a very innocent nature to him, kind of like a child, ‘’ Rae said recently. She knows some people might question whether the marriage was a sham, arranged so that Mo could remain in the U.S., but she insists it was not.
“I actually proposed marriage to my husband,’’ she said. “I knew he loved me, but I knew he would never bring it up because of those issues. He also told me if I didn’t want to file any papers with the INS, that was fine. He didn’t get married for that reason. He had an appeal going on in his asylum case and felt like he would win that anyway.’’
After their wedding on Jan. 28, 2000, however, the Alafyounys decided to drop his asylum appeal and file for a change in his immigration status now that he was married to a U.S. citizen. The case was returned to Copeland, but Copeland was no longer able to handle it because of immigration problems in his own family.
Copeland got married the same year the Alafyounys did — to a Colombian woman with her own immigration problems. Copeland’s wife, who had come here in the early 1990s, had overstayed her visa, according to press accounts. While his wife’s problems were being resolved, immigration officials disqualified Copeland from hearing immigration cases involving marriages.
Alafyouny’s case languished in immigration limbo for about a year — a year that changed the Alafyounys’ world and lives. During that time, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and Congress responded by passing the USA PATRIOT Act.
Eventually, Alafyouny’s request to stay in the U.S. was routed to another immigration judge, Dietrich H. Sims, who heard the case in February 2002. For Mo to become a legal permanent resident, the Alafyounys had to prove that their marriage was not a dodge to avoid deportation and that Mo wasn’t otherwise disqualified to reside in the U.S. The first part was easy. Sims found no evidence that the Alafyounys’ marriage was a sham — but he did find a little-known provision of the PATRIOT Act that barred Mo from becoming a resident.
The law states that foreigners cannot become residents unless they can prove that they never knowingly collected any money that was used for terrorism. Alafyouny says he didn’t know how the PLO used the money he collected.
Founded in 1964, the PLO was an umbrella organization for many fractured groups seeking the return of the Palestinian state. A decade later, the UN granted the organization observer status, and the PLO later recognized Israel’s right to exist. Some of the more militant groups within the PLO, like Yassir Arafat’s Al Fatah party, engaged in armed struggle against the Israeli Defense Force, while other factions, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, resorted to hijackings, bombing, and other acts of terrorism. Other organizations within the PLO sought to improve the conditions for the millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps — who in addition to having inadequate health care, education, and food, were often civilian victims of armed conflict. Alafyouny began to collect donations a year after the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in southern Lebanon, in which a Lebanese sectarian group killed thousands of unarmed Palestinians in two refugee camps.
Since the period when Alafyouny was raising money for it, the PLO has morphed from being the de facto government of a stateless people to forming the core of the recently created Palestinian Authority, which Arafat and another PLO chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, have led. Both President Bush and former President Clinton have recognized the PLO’s dream of establishing a homeland, and the U.S. government has given more than $75 million in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority. Though the PLO has never officially been designated as a terror group by the state department, Congress did refer to it as such in a law passed in 1987. Since that law’s passage, Clinton and George W. Bush have issued repeated six-month waivers, allowing U.S. aid that goes to the Palestinian Authority to filter to the PLO.
In his ruling, Sims agreed there was no evidence that Alafyouny “collected funds for a specific terrorist activity.’’ But the judge said he did not believe Alafyouny “was as naïve as he claims’’ about how the PLO might have used the money he collected. Although the organization was not officially designated as a terror group at the time of Alafyouny’s involvement, Sims wrote, factions within the PLO had attempted at other times to achieve their goals “by terrorizing governments, military installations, and civilian populations.’’
Sims’ ruling struck the Alafyounys as convoluted and even confused some scholars. “You have to prove you didn’t know what they don’t even know happened?’’ Rae asked. “The PLO wasn’t proven to be a terrorist organization, but he had to prove he didn’t know they were.”
Alafyouny’s brother said immigration officials want it both ways. “They say he’s not dangerous enough to be persecuted in Jordan, but he is dangerous enough to be [deported]. It’s scary. Nobody know what’s going to happen next.’’
Emile Sahliyeh, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of North Texas, said the assumption that Alafyouny’s fund raising for the PLO was inherently tied to terrorist activity seems “very weird.”
“If it’s just collecting money ... that goes to social welfare activity or education for Palestinians in refugee camps, I don’t see any connection to terrorism,” said Sahliyeh, author of the book, The PLO after the Lebanon War.
In court papers, his attorney says Alafyouny could not have known “without the assistance of Nostradamus or Edgar Cayce” whether the PLO used some of the money for terrorism. Fort Worth Weekly asked ICE whether it had evidence showing that Alafyouny knew the money he raised went to terrorism or that he had been involved in any other terroristic activity, but agency officials declined to answer, citing privacy concerns and Alafyouny’s appeal.
As her husband waits on the federal courts to rule on his case, Rae Alafyouny has written long letters explaining her family’s plight to everyone she thought might help. Her congressman, Jeb Hensarling, responded that he couldn’t help because the Constitution’s separation of powers clause prevented him from taking action on a case before a federal judge. A plea to Secretary of State Colin Powell yielded a form letter from the state department pledging to make “every effort to ensure the safety and security of the United States for all who are here, including foreign visitors.’’ U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ office sent the letter it received to Nuria Prendes, director of the Dallas immigration office that has been trying to deport Alafyouny. Prendes responded that Rae’s concerns “have previously been considered’’ and that Rae’s husband would remain locked up. Even the Dallas office of the ACLU rejected her plea for help, responding with a form letter that, among other things, asked her to volunteer or contribute money to its cause.
Since he’s been detained, Alafyouny has been twice questioned by federal agents. A couple of days after he was picked up, the FBI questioned him in Dallas. The FBI agent “told me ‘I’m going to ask you some questions’,” Alafyouny said. “Do I go to mosque? Do I pray? Do I know some people? He showed me some pictures.” Alafyouny said that he never went to mosque, and when the FBI held up headshots of Arab men, some with beards, he said that he didn’t recognize any of them. Then the FBI official pulled out pictures from his wedding, submitted in his change of status application, asking who the Arab men were.
The FBI agents did not ask him about his PLO involvement; those questions were posed instead one month later, by state department officials. When the officials concluded their interview, according to Alafyouny, they wished him luck.
In rulings that have freed hundreds of foreigners from U.S. prisons and jails, the U.S. Supreme Court has said that immigrations officials can not indefinitely detain foreigners simply because they can’t deport them. But those cases involved foreigners whose home countries, for whatever reason, would not accept them.
In Alafyouny’s case, a federal judge — not a foreign government — is blocking his deportation. The judge ordered immigration officials to temporarily halt efforts to deport Alafyouny until the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rules on his case. Immigration officials said he’s not eligible for release because the Supreme Court rulings do not apply to people whose deportation has been blocked by a federal judge.
“For the first eight years he was here, they knew who he was, where he was, and what he had done, and yet they didn’t feel it was necessary to lock him up. If he were dangerous, you or I ... would want him behind bars,’’’ attorney Turin said.
But no one, Turin said, really believes Alafyouny is dangerous. He’s just being held, he said, “because of the level of paranoia.’’ He said the old legal maxim — that it’s better to let nine guilty people go free than to convict an innocent person — has been turned on its head. In the post-9/11 world, some believe, “it’s better to lock up nine innocent people than to let one guilty person go free.’’
Sitting in the windowless Rolling Plains prison cafeteria in his blue prison uniform, Alafyouny said he came to America looking for freedom. Now he’s unsure if America represents that ideal.
“I’m thinking why I’m here,” said Alafyouny. “If 9/11 didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be here. Because of what happened with 9/11, our reputation — people with names like Mahmoud and Muhammad — is gone.”
If the Alafyounys lose their federal case and Mo is deported, Rae will have to decide whether to follow her husband and resettle in a new land or say good-bye to him, perhaps forever.
“When I married an alien, I gave up a lot of my rights as an American citizen instead of him acquiring anything,” Rae said. “I’ll lose the right to live in this country if they deport my husband. I’ll have to go live in another country [to remain with him]. It’s something I could understand and accept if my husband was involved with a group that’s known for violence like Al Qaeda or Hamas ... . I don’t feel that I’ve been shown respect as an American citizen by how they’ve used the PATRIOT Act against my husband.’’
“Before that happens, I have to fight this to the fullest,’’ she said. “Part of the problem with [immigration agencies] and these situations is that some people don’t fight, or they don’t have the means to fight, or they don’t want to sit in jail that long,” while appeals make their way through the courts.
“But I believe you have to fight.’’
You can reach Dan Malone at dan.malone@fwweekly.com
and Shomial Ahmad at shomial.ahmad@fwweekly.com.
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