December 25 2020
US government documents released recently show that immigration officials at the US-Canada border detained almost five times the number of Iranians previously believed detained one weekend last January when the US got fearful of Iran taking retaliatory action right after the US killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani.
The documents, including internal emails, were released November 17 by a federal judge in Washington state after a freedom of information act request by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
The emails reveal that 277 people of Iranian heritage were detained in a 24-hour period January 3-4 at the Peace Arch Border Crossing between Surrey, British Columbia, and Blaine, Washington—far more than the 60 originally estimated by the Council on American Islamic Relations.
The documents also show that the head of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), who proclaimed ignorance about what was going at the border, actually edited public statements about the detentions.
The vast majority were detained more than two hours, with nearly a third held more than five hours, according to one CBP email. Forty-one were held longer than six hours while two were held more than nine hours.
The detentions began less than 24 hours after an airstrike that killed Gen. Soleymani, the head of the Qods Force.
At the time, the CBP said Soleymani’s killing had triggered an escalation in the threat level over fears of retribution, but denied it had led to any directive that Iranians crossing the border be detained.
A leaked memo from the CBP’s Seattle field office showed last January that officials of that office did indeed direct agents to vet anyone with connections to Iran and other Middle Eastern countries in the wake of Soleymani’s killing. But the order only applied to entry points from Canada that came under the Seattle field office.
In February, acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan acknowledged to reporters that agents in Blaine behaved in a way “that was not in line with our direction. I would say in that one instance leadership got a little overzealous, and we corrected that right away.”
Yet the emails also show that Morgan helped craft the statement to the media that denied Iranian-Americans were being detained because of their country of origin.
Morgan also added a line to the statement that denied CBP ever issued such a directive, despite the Seattle field office memo referred to numerous times in other emails and documents.
The 277 detainees included 85 American citizens whose passports showed they were born in Iran. Others were US green card holders.
Some of the detainees were Canadian citizens, according to North Vancouver resident Sam Sadr, who told Global News in January that he grew up and did all of his schooling in Japan. “I was just born in Iran, that’s it.”
According to the released emails, the CBP’s field office in Seattle issued a directive in early January that “all persons (males and females) born after 1961 and born before 2001 with links to Palestine, Lebanon or Iran are to be vetted with extra questioning on their entry to the United States from British Columbia, Canada.”
CAIR-Washington’s director Imraan Siddiqi said that the court’s decision to order the release of the emails was a huge victory. “There is no basis for detaining individuals due to their national origin,” said Siddiqi. “Not only were the CBP’s actions illegal, but they explicitly colluded to cover it up and keep their actions from the American people.”