Government Apologizes to Iraqi Refugee for Wrongful Detention

Abdul Habeeb speaks to reporters at a news conference at the offices of the ACLU of Washington in Seattle on Thursday Aug. 23, 2007. Habeeb, 41, of suburban Kent, spent eight days in custody before officials realized their mistake. They dropped deportation proceedings against him the following month, but Habeeb sued in 2005, seeking an apology and financial compensation — both of which he received, according to a settlement agreement released Thursday. (AP Photo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Gilbert W. Arias)

23 August 2007
By GENE JOHNSON
AP LEGAL AFFAIRS WRITER

SEATTLE -- The Justice Department has apologized and paid $250,000 to an Iraqi refugee wrongly detained in 2003 when he stepped off an Amtrak train in Montana to stretch his legs.

Abdul Habeeb, 41, of suburban Kent, spent eight days in custody before officials realized their mistake. They dropped deportation proceedings against him the following month, but Habeeb sued in 2005, seeking an apology and financial compensation - both of which he received, according to a settlement agreement released Thursday.

"You are an Iraqi who was admitted into the United States as a refugee," Acting U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan in Seattle wrote in a June 13 letter to Habeeb. "You did nothing wrong. The United States of America regrets the mistake."

"Apologies are issued by the federal government when we're wrong," Sullivan said Thursday. "Maybe we don't do it as often as we should, but in this case we were wrong, and I felt good about signing the letter."

Habeeb, an artist who says he was repeatedly jailed under Saddam Hussein's regime, came to the U.S. in 2002, settling in the Seattle area. He was on his way to take a job at an Islamic newspaper in Washington, D.C., when the train stopped in Havre, Mont., about 75 miles from Canada, on April 1, 2003.

As he wandered around the station and platform, he was confronted by border patrol agents who asked where he was from and demanded to see his documentation. Habeeb provided it, but when they asked him if he had undergone "special registration" - a post-Sept. 11 requirement that noncitizen males from about two dozen countries be fingerprinted and photographed - he told them he didn't know he had to.

In fact, he didn't have to. Political refugees were exempted from "special registration."

Nevertheless, the agents took him into custody. He was kept at the Hill County Jail in Montana for three nights, during which time he was subjected to a strip search and interrogated about whether he knew anyone who didn't like the U.S. He was then transferred to immigration detention in Seattle for four nights before he was given his suitcase back and told to go home, he said.

After his detention, the newspaper where he planned to work wouldn't have him, he said. He resumed working for a furniture maker in Seattle instead.

"I came with my dreams to America - about the freedom, about the life, about the art," he said at a news conference the American Civil Liberties Association held in downtown Seattle on Thursday. "I feel like today is my first day in America. I want to open my art gallery."

He also said that once he becomes a U.S. citizen he hopes to bring his wife and three boys to the U.S. from Baghdad.

Habeeb filed two lawsuits - one in federal district court at Great Falls, Mont., against the Customs and Border Protection agents, and one in Seattle against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

His case in Montana was dismissed by a U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon last year; as part of the agreement settling the two lawsuits, the Justice Department and the ACLU, which took up Habeeb's case, asked the Montana judge, Sam Haddon, to vacate his decision as erroneous. The judge did so last month.

"Mr. Habeeb came from a country where he never knew if the government was going to follow the rules," said one of his attorneys, Aaron Caplan. "He came to America to get away from that."