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(3) TREATMENT OF FAMILY MEMBERS OF CERTAIN ALIENS—In the case of a principal alien issued an immigrant visa number under section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1153(c)) for fiscal year 2001, if such principal alien died as a direct result of a specified terrorist activity, the aliens who were, on September 10, 2001, the spouse and children of such principal alien shall, until June 30, 2002, if not otherwise entitled to an immigrant status and the immediate issuance of a visa under subsection (a), (b), or (c) of section 203 of such Act, be entitled to the same status, and the same order of consideration, that would have been provided to such alien spouse or child under section 203(d) of such Act as if the principal alien were not deceased and as if the spouse or child’s visa application had been adjudicated by September 30, 2001.
—Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT)
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Terrorism operates on a simple mathematical formula—kill one, frighten thousands. It’s a way for small groups to exercise power exponentially beyond their numbers. For most Americans, September 11, 2001, brought a new understanding of terror as thousands died live on our television sets. Terror stopped being something that happened “over there” and became something that threatened our greatest cities. In a 2016 survey of what Americans fear, terrorism made two of the top ten spots. Forty-one percent of respondents believed the nation would suffer a major terror attack in the near future, the second-highest anxiety. And more than 38 percent feared that they personally would be the target of an attack, scoring fourth-highest on the list.
Terror has become a problem that not only reaches around the globe but into our psyches. In my practice, I’ve seen how it has affected our government, our culture, and our people.
The Terrorist
In legal parlance, being “called to the bar” means a person is admitted to argue a case in court. It’s the difference between being a law student and being a lawyer. The phrase has a clubby, almost boozy feel—there are a lot of jokes about “passing the bar.” But there is a physical bar in most courtrooms, separating the spectators from the area where the work of the court is done: the desks for the opposing counsels, the clerk’s table, the judge’s bench, and if necessary, the jury box. In most courtrooms, it’s a notional barrier, a low wooden railing.
But as I stepped into court on June 18, 1997, I passed a bar that was no laughing matter. It was transparent, floor to ceiling, and bulletproof. This was a courtroom for terrorism cases, built on the grim assumption that any proceedings here might become a target for extremists. That’s what my client was accused of being—someone complicit in killing nineteen Americans. Although I had spoken with him extensively on the phone, I had physically met Hani al-Sayegh only that morning. Skinny, bearded, with a white shirt and a tentative manner, he seemed more like a student. And, indeed, he had extensively studied the Koran. That had led him to trouble in his native Saudi Arabia.
Most people think of two things when it comes to Saudi Arabia—oil and the Muslim religion—an absolute monarchy that uses its oil wealth to command world attention far beyond its size or population. On a closer look, despite sharing the same language and culture, Saudi Arabians have many divisions among low- and high-status tribes, but especially in religion. That might sound strange, discussing a country that’s overwhelmingly Muslim, but 10 to 15 percent of the Saudi population follow the Shia sect of the faith. The schism is more than a thousand years old, and it has divided the Middle East. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are predominantly Sunni; Iran, Iraq, and several other states have a majority of Shias.
It’s an irony of history that a country known for using petrodollars to disseminate the intolerant, fundamentalist Wahhabi form of Sunni doctrine gets that wealth from its eastern sections, where the population is 75 percent Shia. Shiite Saudis are second-class citizens, discriminated against for government jobs, especially dealing with national security. Shias are restricted from employment in the petroleum industry. Even in the courts, their testimony has less weight than that of their Sunni neighbors. The situation worsened when the Iranian revolution of 1979 created a militant Shiite nation geographically close to the Saudi oilfields. Political repression got worse, with fatwas (religious rulings by important clerics) denouncing the Shias for falling away from the true faith, and even sanctioning the killing of Shia followers.
The political situation only grew more complicated with the first Persian Gulf War of 1990. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait threatened the precious Saudi oil fields, and King Fahd asked for American help, welcoming U.S. troops. The Saudi king is known as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, or Guardian of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which seems a hollow title if Fahd had to depend on foreign, infidel soldiers to do the job.
The end of the war and the establishment of no-fly zones in Iraq meant U.S. airmen had to be stationed in Saudi Arabia, causing more unrest and offering an American target for Arab extremists. The result was the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996. Nineteen Air Force personnel died in their quarters, and hundreds more were injured. Although not as bad as the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut, where more than two hundred died, that had happened in a war zone. The Khobar blast took place in a nation supposedly at peace, a secure ally of the United States. It was a complicated operation, involving a tanker truck with some 5,000 pounds of explosives, a scout vehicle, and a getaway car. For all the Saudi assurances of wholehearted cooperation, the FBI investigators who arrived the next day should have gotten their biggest clue when they discovered that their hosts had already bulldozed any forensic evidence out of existence. The Saudis made extensive arrests in search of the perpetrators, but U.S. agents never got to question them. That was why, when a young man possibly involved with the bombing ran afoul of Canadian anti-terror immigration provisions in 1997, the FBI was interested indeed. The young man was Hani al-Sayegh.
I became involved thanks to my friend Mohammed al Khilewi, who phoned me after hearing of the situation from a Saudi dissident. Apparently, I was becoming known in Middle Eastern circles, because when Sayegh actually talked to Khilewi, he knew my name! Khilewi knew that Sayegh needed a good lawyer, and the FBI agreed. This was no case of concern over due process for a terrorist. It was part of a political and counterintelligence calculation—a chance for the United States to get hold of a source with insider information on Middle Eastern terrorism. For the last century, our country has leveraged its technology to win wars. From artillery and air power to orbital surveillance, drones, and information intercepts, tech has been our go-to weapon. That hasn’t been an unfailing success. In 1998, India arranged a surprise six-bomb nuclear testing series despite observation from our spy satellites. Human intelligence, from agents and sources on the ground, still remains paramount, as our enemies have shown. When the USSR collapsed, the successors of the KGB were quick to adopt the technology of the CIA and Britain’s MI6, but they also maintained large human networks.
Another important wrinkle in the al-Sayegh case was the chance to talk to a Saudi terrorist without having to go through the Saudi government, that had its own political agenda regarding what we might learn. Khilewi stressed the opportunity of learning from Sayegh while we could. “If he gets back to Saudi Arabia,” Khilewi warned, “something will happen to him.” The question was, “How could we hold onto Sayegh, and what could we do to get information out of him?” FBI agents knew they’d have to negotiate a deal and were very forthcoming when I made inquiries. Maybe it’s a sign of how unprepared our government was to navigate these murky waters that several agents ended up facing an investigation from the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI’s internal affairs department, suspected of soliciting my services for a suspect.
As I spoke with Sayegh, he told me the story of a young man who became involved with a group of disaffected youths in his local mosque who were suppressed by the government, and going on a ten-year odyssey through Shia-related extremist groups, Shirazi, Hezbollah al Hejaz in Saudi Arabia, and the group’s offshoot in Kuwait. Mainly, however, his connection was with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which paid him stipends for his religious education, as well as political indoctrination and even military training with the Lebanese Hezbollah. Although his spirit was willing, his flesh was not up to the rigorous physical demands. Asthma made his training a fiasco, and he found himself relegated to maintaining archives, essentially engaging in a clipping service for the terrorist cause.
Although he did engage in surveillance and fact-finding missions, Sayegh denied any involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing, neither the planning nor the operation. He claimed to be in the Iranian city of Qom, having returned to his religious studies. However, the prosecution had identified him as the driver of the scouting car in the bombing mission, blinking his vehicle’s lights to signal the bomb truck to move into position. Sayegh claimed he first heard of the Khobar attack by way of a phone call from his wife. He chose to leave the Middle East because he was sick of persecution for his religious beliefs and politics, traveling to Syria, Italy, and finally flying to Canada after a brief stopover in Boston. Only when he arrived in Canada did he hear from his brother that the Saudi security service was searching for him because of the bombing.
While staying in Ottawa for several months, Sayegh was under surveillance from Canadian security. He applied for asylum but was arrested as a threat to the nation’s security. As I entered the situation, Canada wanted to deport Sayegh. The question was, where should he go? Both the American FBI and Saudi security wanted him. My job would be to make the best deal I could for my client, which meant arranging for cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. Sayegh understood the alternative, telling me, “They will chop my head off if I go back to Saudi Arabia.”
By this point, I was further along in my chosen career and more aware of the priorities. Essentially, I’d be sitting down in a poker game with the king of Saudi Arabia and the head of the FBI for the life of Hani Sayegh. I made it clear to my client that I would represent him pro bono so long as he cooperated. To me, Sayegh represented a chance for U.S. law enforcement and security to put faces and personalities to the names in the government’s transcripts of phone intercepts. Though Sayegh claimed to have little information, government agents believed he was holding back, perhaps because of his family. His wife and two children were in the hands of the Saudis, who had confiscated their travel papers.
Though much of the information he shared has been placed under seal by the government, I believe I can tell one story. Traditionally, Shias use prayer rocks, holy stones that they tap against their foreheads while praying. The practice is frowned upon by the Wahhabi religious authorities, which bans the importation of these holy stones. That doesn’t stop the Shias from smuggling them into Saudi Arabia—or Sayegh’s group from adding explosives to shipments of the sacred stones.
Sayegh required an interpreter, and as I interviewed him I took the precaution of switching interpreters every fifteen minutes to restrict the flow of information to any particular person. That turned out to be a good call; we discovered one of the Canadian Arab speakers had been compromised by a foreign intelligence agency. Luckily, I was able to depend on loyal friends Mohammed al Khilewi and Steve Stylianoudis to get information from my client.
Certain parts of the case took on a spy novel hall of mirrors aspect. In addition to U.S. security, I dealt with intelligence services from friendly countries, Saudi dissidents in London and elsewhere, and various experts on the Middle East, as well as international journalists. I was very distrustful of foreign media. They might represent legitimate news operations, or they could be foreign operatives trying to familiarize themselves with my daily routine. I never met with them in my office space for interviews, only using public areas and for only brief amounts of time.
I had moved to Englewood, New Jersey, and I have to credit the local government for its efforts in keeping my family safe. They maintained a constant police presence, routing trucks away from our block. Any cars coming onto the street had to pop their trunks, and the police patrolled the perimeter of our property every few hours. Some neighbors kidded me, saying there should be a large sign with an arrow pointing to my house, but for me it was no joke. I started self-defense training and bought a gun. I had a wife and two children to protect, after all.
I represented Sayegh on the immigration side of the deal, but he also faced criminal charges and had an attorney for them. The Canadians deported Sayegh to the United States, and Attorney General Janet Reno had granted an immigration exception for the sole purpose of trying him in a U.S. court for his part in the bombing. I got the news at a Father’s Day kindergarten breakfast with my daughter Raquel, then five years old. She managed to spill milk all over herself when my beeper went off. Later that day, the government sent me the government’s motion to seal the plea agreement. Because of that seal, I’m still unable to discuss the deal we made. Suffice it to say my client would plead guilty to an earlier, nonfatal plot, which would put him safely in U.S. custody.
I flew down to Washington, finally meeting Sayegh face to face. Up to this point, all our discussions had been conducted over the telephone. I checked into my hotel and met with a score of reporters, congressional staffers, and interpreters before turning to the business of the afternoon. Later I discovered that the scene at my office was even crazier, with requests coming from respected journalists such as Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, and requests for exclusives coming from 60 Minutes and ABC, plus Canadian and European news organizations.
My meeting with Sayegh was spent going over the upcoming court proceedings, although we discussed some of his hopes for the future. Then I was off to the courthouse, finding about sixty news cameras and a good hundred media types waiting for me. Inside the fortresslike courtroom, we went through the usual preliminaries. Then I went outside to discover the crowd of news people had doubled. I kept my comments brief, mainly saying that the proceedings had been placed under seal. It was a very busy news cycle. The same day, after a four-year manhunt, a joint CIA/FBI task force had captured a young Pakistani who had killed two CIA employees. He had sprayed automatic weapons fire at cars entering the gates of the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. The two stories dominated front pages of newspapers all over the country.
I received less pleasant news when I returned to Sayegh and found him suffering from a stress-induced asthma attack. When I demanded that he get an inhaler, he was sent to a hospital under an FBI SWAT team escort. His FBI handlers also shared Sayegh’s medical file. It seemed that the skin test had come back positive for tuberculosis. They suggested I might want to consult with an infectious disease specialist because I had spent hours in close quarters with Sayegh. In the end, I decided to issue a statement about Sayegh’s asthma but not to mention the tuberculosis. That I’d get to worry about on my own time.
When I returned to my hotel, I learned that the Washington Post had already filed a legal motion on behalf of ABC, CNN, and a whole alphabet’s worth of news organizations to unseal the day’s court proceedings. I had a busy night on the phone, with perhaps one light moment. My father was in Florida, speaking at the convention of the AILA. He was quite surprised to find a picture of his son on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel.
The next hearing in the case had been set for a week away, and I spent the time in conference with the judge, the U.S. attorney’s office, the criminal lawyer assigned to the case, and with Sayegh. He was staying in an FBI safe house, his health having improved. The asthma was under control, and a chest X-ray was negative for tuberculosis. Though Sayegh did not seem to be contagious, I was given medication as a precaution.
The client might have been well, but the case took a very bad turn. Instead of pleading guilty to the charges as he had agreed, Sayegh declared himself innocent. I don’t understand this decision. Yes, as subsequent events showed, the government didn’t have a strong enough case to convict, so they withdrew the criminal charges. But by beating the rap there, Sayegh destroyed his deal. There was still the immigration case, and Sayegh was an avowed terrorist facing deportation. From the outset, I had stipulated that my help for Sayegh was contingent on him cooperating with the authorities. He hadn’t done that, so I withdrew from the case.
Hani al Sayegh was deported from the United States on October 10, 1999, and sent back to Saudi Arabia. Supposedly the Saudis had agreed not to torture him. On his arrival, he was held incommunicado at Al-Ha’ir Prison for ten days before his wife and children were allowed to see him. Saudi Arabia is an extremely closed society, and it’s difficult to get information out of the country. Was he tried for his reputed association with the Khobar bombing? Was he, as he feared, beheaded? Was he hanged? There is no solid information about his fate.
In 2001, the Department of Justice issued an indictment for several people suspected of involvement in the Khobar Towers attack. Among them was Hani al-Sayegh. For me, it defies understanding how the government could have someone in detention, let him slip through their fingers, and then go through the empty process of indicting him years after he was probably executed. A federal judge ruled in 2006 that the attack was the work of Hezbollah with the help of Iran providing funds, plans, and maps. However, this was a default judgment—the Iranians were not present in court and never had a chance to challenge the assertions against them.
For many people, the question still remains, “Who was responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing?” Based on his knowledge of his homeland, my friend Mohammed al Khilewi believes the Saudi government was somehow involved, playing both sides, the Americans and the Shias, against each other for political benefit. Steve Stylianoudis, who has developed a rare insight into Middle Eastern politics, looked toward the Saudi royal family. Political intrigue is a fairly bare-knuckled pastime among the royals. Crown Prince Abdullah, who was virulently anti-American at the time, might have had a hand in orchestrating the plot. Blowing up some Americans would embarrass his brother, King Fahd, and by implicating Iran, force a harder line against that country. It would also counter the next prince in line for the throne, Sultan (father of Prince Bandar, the Washington ambassador), who was courting the United States to support his ambitions. After all, the year before, extremists had attacked the Saudi National Guard, which was Abdullah’s power base in the country.
My own theory on the situation was that the Saudis tossed Sayegh to U.S. law enforcement essentially as a scapegoat because they had withheld access to the other perpetrators. Faced with these terror accusations, Sayegh had lied about his activities, fearful of being deported to Saudi Arabia. The truth will never be known. I find it interesting, though, that sometime after Sayegh was deported, an FBI agent asked if my client had happened to mention a new name in the news . . . Osama bin Laden.
If the Khobar Tower bombing was a wake-up call, the events of September 11, 2001, were a four-alarm fire. Three jet aircraft where hijacked and used as weapons of mass destruction, destroying the World Trade Towers and damaging the Pentagon. Thanks to a counterattack by passengers, a fourth plane failed to complete its attack, although the hijackers crashed it with complete loss of life for all on board. In all, nearly 3,000 people died that day. Almost six hundred had been born in countries other than the United States and were here under various immigration categories. In nearly a hundred cases, victims’ families did not request death certificates. Some of these were probably immigrants as well—undocumented immigrants. Whether visiting executives or dishwashers, the loss of life was equally tragic.
But the suffering didn’t end there. The death and destruction also left whole families in immigration limbo. In many households, one family member held the green card that allowed residence, and those crashing jetliners had murdered that person. What happened then? I’ll tell you the stories of two families I was able to help.
Paul Gilbey was a British national working in the financial field. He and his wife Deena had been living in the United States for ten years. They had two sons who were born here, but neither of the Gilbeys were U.S. citizens. They had applied for green cards in 1994, but Paul had changed jobs, forcing them to begin the procedure all over again. On September 11, Paul was working for a firm called Eurobrokers as a vice president on the eighty-fourth floor of the South Tower. Eurobrokers was one of the few firms that began evacuating its offices after the North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m. Gilbey helped coworkers get down the stairs. Then the announcement system came on, reassuring everyone that the building was stable and telling them to return to their offices. Gilbey headed upstairs—right into the impact zone for the second suicide airliner.
Deena Gilbey had been getting her older son off to school when a neighbor told her about the first strike. She spoke to Paul, who told her he was leaving the building. That was the last she heard from him, but she spent the day holding onto hope that he had escaped. As evening came, her hope began to fade. She tells a story about talking the matter over with her younger son, and how he suggested that they talk to the police to make sure they were looking for his dad. The local township police were very kind to the little boy who had probably been orphaned.
Deena was still dealing with this terrible news when another blow hit her, this one courtesy of the INS. The Gilbeys had residency in the United States thanks to a long-term work visa in Paul’s name. With Paul’s passing, that visa expired. Mason and Max, her sons, were U.S. citizens by virtue of being born here. Deena, however, was not—and was told that she faced deportation. This news outraged the local police chief, who joined Deena in a campaign to enlist the aid of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as talking to American and British media outlets. The sad fact is that the catastrophe left hundreds of spouses and children in the same situation. The government tried to do something for them in the PATRIOT ACT, passed forty-five days after September 11. Most of the bill’s language dealt with strengthening national security, but provisions were added to help spouses and children of victims. They were allowed to remain in the United States until September 10, 2002, or until the visa they had depended on expired, whichever came first. Dependents were also allowed to receive green cards—if an application had been made before the September 11 attacks.
That second caveat created a stumbling block for many families. In Deena’s case, she was told that although the family had applied for residency in 1994 and had started over when Paul changed jobs, the “paperwork had not reached a certain level of the process,” and the application was denied. A lot of people were incensed over this development. My favorite reaction was by the local police chief, who threatened to stand guard with a rifle on the Gilbeys’ front porch to keep the INS at bay.
Others took a more nuanced approach. After introducing a bill to extend citizenship to the spouses and children of 9/11 victims in general, New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine added a private bill to naturalize Deena Gilbey and her family. This was backed by other New York and New Jersey senators and read in part, “Paul Gilbey was killed in a callous and cowardly attack on America. In the aftermath of this tragic event, we have a responsibility to help ensure that stability returns to the lives of the children he left behind.” Unfortunately, the bill never got to the Senate floor. Many private bills die, usually because the lawmakers don’t feel there’s sufficient hardship to help an individual. Or perhaps, as Deena heard from an INS agent, there is fear it would set a dangerous precedent. Frankly, I found that response lacking in both sensitivity and heart. But perhaps it is only too indicative of the kind of bureaucratic inertia that had the INS deliver a student visa, six months after 9/11, to the Florida flight school where Mohammed Atta trained for his part in flying a hijacked plane into the Trade Center.
Thanks to the help of the New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, and British publications such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, we took the case to the court of public opinion. Though the INS denied it, publicity seemed to have an effect. Grounds for reevaluating the case were found, and Deena faced an hour-long, videotaped interview with immigration officials. The ordeal might have been prolonged until I reminded them that Deena had already undergone vetting by the CIA in relation to the private naturalization bill.
On July 22, 2002, after ten months of stress and struggle, Deena received a green card, allowing her to work and live in this country. For the Gilbey family, however, there is something far more important. “Paul’s body has not been found and is unlikely to be,” Deena has said. “His grave site will always be the World Trade Center. My children and I are experiencing a genuine longing to reach out and be close to Paul, even if the only way to do that is by visiting his grave site. I simply cannot imagine not living in the country where my husband and father of my children is buried.”
The Gilbey case illustrated how terrorism and bureaucratic inflexibility threatened even a rising young banker’s family. The story of the Ryjov family featured more of the ups and downs of an immigrant’s life.
Vasily Ryjov was an engineer on Soviet vessels, which often took him to ports in the United States. Even though he was disaffected by the Soviet system, he feared to jump ship because of the repercussions for his family back home. When his wife Tatiana was sent to the United States as a translator, she took their two-year-old son and never came back. Pressured by the KGB, Vasily divorced Tatiana and still lost his job.
The couple was determined to reunite, and in 1991 Tatiana successfully petitioned for a tourist visa to bring Vasily to the states. They were remarried, and another son was born in 1993. Vasily tried to apply for asylum but was rejected. He wound up paying $4,000 to someone he thought was an immigration lawyer to get a work permit. This process involved signing several papers, even though Vasily didn’t read English. In the end, he received a work permit and continued working in construction even after the permit expired. The person who was supposed to help him disappeared with the money, but Vasily thought things were okay. As he explains, “I was paying taxes, buying a house, raising a family. If I knew I did something wrong, I would be staying low, wouldn’t I?”
It wasn’t an easy life, but as Vasily says, “When you live in former USSR and you have almost no rights, you kind of hope for better future for your children. You can sacrifice a lot.” Tatiana went into the computer field and applied for a green card in 1996. In 2000, they bought a house in Westchester, New York. Then, in 2001, they received wonderful news—Tatiana had won a spot in the annual green card lottery! Officially known as the Diversity Visa program, this lottery gives people from countries with a low rate of immigration a chance to get a visa for the United States, but at very high odds—50,000 visas out of eleven million entrants. That Tatiana managed to win was a piece of incredible luck.
But only four months later, the family’s luck turned. Tatiana was working on the ninety-first floor of the South Tower during the terrorist attack. At least in her case there were some remains that were identified by DNA analysis. In a news interview, Vasily cupped his hands to show the pitiful size of the sample. But when he tried to recover those remains, he received another shock. The INS was denying his residency application. According to their records, among those unintelligible documents he’d signed eight years previously were some bogus marriage documents. To the immigration authorities, this constituted fraud—and a valid reason to reject Vasily’s application.
Vasily was crushed. “I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a green card. And I’m going to be deported.” That was the situation we faced as I took the case. My first job was to prove that fraud had been attempted but that Vasily had been the victim rather than the perpetrator—and we did so. We also sought to mobilize public opinion in Vasily’s favor through media appearances, and we reached out to political figures for help.
New York Senator Charles Schumer quickly came to our support, saying, “With all they’ve been through, deporting a family who had suffered such a loss in the World Trade Center attacks would be unconscionable. Part of their lives was shattered on September eleventh. It would be a shame to shatter their dream of remaining in America.” With the senator taking an interest, we were able to persuade immigration officials to revisit the case, especially in light of the PATRIOT ACT’s sections on providing green cards for surviving spouses and children.
The case also attracted considerable public sympathy. A female Wall Street executive, someone who didn’t even know Vasily, called us, offering to marry him to improve his status. We don’t do that kind of thing in our practice, but it shows how the story had touched people’s hearts. It took longer to resolve the Ryjov case favorably. The older, foreign-born son, Alex, got a green card, and in the end, so did Vasily. Personally, I found it reflected very poorly once again on our business-as-usual bureaucracy that so much time went by. These are people who suffered unimaginable loss on our soil. The least we could say is “You’re one of us now.” Those children shouldn’t have had to deal with lawyers and bureaucrats. What they needed were psychiatrists and family therapists to help them overcome the pain.
One result of the 9/11 attacks was a roundup of immigrants—documented and otherwise—in the following months. Fear ran high in the immigrant community, so high that people were consulting me at my home in Englewood because they were afraid to be seen entering the offices of an immigration attorney. Even today, fear of terrorism scars the national psyche, pitting two of our greatest rights—life and liberty— against one another. Finding a balance that protects both is a challenge to our very democracy.
The Hero
The year 2001 was not to end without another terror incident on an airliner, this one threatening the lives of 197 people. Air France Flight 63 took off from Paris headed for Miami, full of people traveling for the holiday season. One of them, however, was a terrorist, the heels of his shoes filled with enough plastic explosive to blow the plane out of the sky. In this case, however, the terrorist was foiled, thanks to the efforts of several passengers, including Kwame James, a young professional basketball player. He had been playing on a team in France and was heading home to Trinidad for the Christmas holidays, with a stop in Miami to pick up his girlfriend. Facing a seven-hour flight in a coach seat, he had stayed up the night before in hopes of dozing through an uncomfortable journey.
While the plane was over the Atlantic Ocean, a flight attendant discovered passenger Richard Reid using a match, attempting to light a fuse connected to a shoe in his lap. Reid, a British citizen with loyalty to the terrorist group al Qaeda, was having difficulties detonating the explosives hidden in the shoe, which apparently had been dampened by perspiration from his feet. The six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Reid floored the flight attendant and fought with another as other passengers became involved in the fray.
At six feet, eight inches, James was the biggest man on the plane. He was awakened from a sound sleep by a flight attendant, stood dumb-founded for a moment and then helped to subdue the terrorist, who was then tied in his seat with plastic handcuffs, belts, and headphone cords. As fighter planes escorted the airliner, which diverted to Boston’s Logan Airport, James stood guard over Reid for nearly four hours, fearing there might be another bomb on the plane or additional terrorists.
The plane landed at its alternate destination and James was hailed as a hero. After the horror of 9/11, the American public went wild for the story of a group of passengers overpowering a terrorist on an airplane— it was a holiday present for a battered nation. James had attended high school in Indiana and played on the University of Evansville basketball team, but he was not a U.S. citizen. He was born in Canada and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and had a worldwide career. In addition to France, he had played ball in Argentina, Korea, and Switzerland. After a barrage of calls from media outlets, James was contacted by government investigators and prosecutors, who promised to arrange a visa for him to stay in this country as a witness against Reid. However, James’s testimony wasn’t needed. Reid subsequently pleaded guilty and received a life sentence for his abortive attack.
The would-be shoe bomber would reside in the United States for the rest of his life—albeit in a super-max prison—but the man who had helped subdue the villain in this incident faced immigration problems. After returning to France, James came to the United States on a tourist visa hoping to get into an NBA team’s development program, but he was cut from a position on the Gary Steelheads, a minor-league basketball team. Government officials admitted that James’s case was “compelling,” but immigration rules do not include visas for training athletes, nor is the government allowed to fast-track a visa application—even if the applicant is a hero. I came into the case in 2003, criticizing the decision: “Is this the message you want to send to someone who looked down the face of terrorism? It was a national disgrace.” On live television, I offered to take James’s case on a pro bono basis.
Meeting my new client was quite an experience. By no means do I consider myself a small guy. But I barely came up to the shoulder of this young man. We made several media appearances together, and I personally brought James’s plight to the attention of then-Senator Hillary Clinton and Congressman Joseph Crowley. “What he did, instinctively jumping up and subduing Richard Reid, this is what citizenship is about,” I argued. “He instinctively did the right thing. He is a hero and a model citizen.” I successfully arranged for an advance parole for James, which allowed him to come and go from this country, and with the help of the Brooklyn Kings, a team in the United States Basketball League, I applied for a P-1 working visa.
James eventually married a U.S. citizen. I had the privilege of helping him apply for his green card and years later, in 2010, for his own U.S. citizenship. Thus, in the end, the Department of Homeland Security relented, and James received the right of residency. “This sends a strong message to the victims of terrorism and the people who help,” I commented at the time. “We will not leave you behind.” Indeed, James has moved forward. Although he did not fulfill his NBA dreams, he did bring his basketball career to a successful conclusion playing on another French team. He tried his hand as a motivational speaker and as a professional trainer and also put his college degree in international business to work, taking a position in the pharmaceutical business. Still married to the young woman he had boarded Flight 63 to meet, he now lives in Georgia and works in information systems.
I never met a man less willing to play the hero card—James always felt there were many others on the plane who deserved recognition for subduing Reid. He has often expressed the wish that his fame had never happened. But he is glad for his opportunities as an American. “I became a citizen of one of the best countries in the world,” he said after his naturalization. There are at least 197 reasons the United States should be glad to have him.