--- Huq-ul-Islam <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> To: [log in to unmask]
> From: Huq-ul-Islam <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:52:12 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [al-Zawiya] NY 18 Year old Muslimah fearing deportation & mutilation
> 
> Assalaamualaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhuh:
>    
>   Many of you remember the deportation of two 16 year old girls from Queens because of their
> supposed imminent threat to national security.  One of the girls, who is now 18, Adama Bah,
> appeared in the following article appearing in NY Times today about her upcoming appeal of
> assylum.
>    
>   I am unsure about the facts surrounding the article.  However, I am troubled by several
> revelations in the article regarding the Adama's family's plight and her current situation now. 
> 
>    
>   Link:
>   Young Woman Fears Deportation, and Mutilation
>  
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/nyregion/26suicide.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1161883503-eq46aglsWtbVopXJAzHtMQ
>    
>   Full Text Below:
>    
>   Young Woman Fears Deportation, and Mutilation 
>   By NINA BERNSTEIN
>      
>   Adama Bah’s schoolmates were jubilant when she returned to 10th grade at Heritage High School
> in Manhattan in May 2005 after six weeks in a distant juvenile detention center. Her release put
> to rest the federal government’s unexplained assertion that Adama, a popular 16-year-old who
> wore jeans under her Islamic garb, was a potential suicide bomber.
>    
>   But a year and a half later, with many of her friends planning proms and applying to college,
> Ms. Bah, now 18, was still wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and tethered to a 10 p.m.
> government curfew, restrictions that were conditions of her release. And she was still facing
> deportation to Guinea, where she has not lived since she was 2. 
>   Today, at a closed hearing in Manhattan’s federal building, she will plead for political
> asylum from Guinea’s entrenched practice of female genital mutilation, which has marked all the
> women in her extended family, including her mother. An immigration judge could decide her fate
> on the spot.
>    
>   “I’m worried about being sent back,” Ms. Bah said on Tuesday in her first extended interview
> about the lasting consequences of a case that briefly became a cause célèbre in the debate over
> government vigilance and the protection of individual liberties. “I’m worried about being
> separated from my family. This is all I have left now — what hasn’t been taken.”
>    
>   Officially, she and a 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl arrested in Queens the same day were
> detained solely because their childhood visas were no longer valid. That remains the only reason
> Ms. Bah is in deportation proceedings, and the sole legal basis for an order last year that
> released the other girl, Tashnuba Hayder, on the condition that she leave the country
> immediately. 
>    
>   Even now, Ms. Bah says she has no idea whether her slight acquaintance with Ms. Hayder was
> what caused agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hold her for questioning. Though a
> document provided by a federal agent at the time said the F.B.I. considered the girls “an
> imminent threat” to national security, it provided no evidence, and officials refused to discuss
> the matter.
>    
>   “Why me?” she asked, before her volunteer lawyers warned that a judicial order limits what she
> can say about the experience. “Nobody answers, why me?”
>   She has had little time to dwell on the question, however, because she has been struggling to
> replace her father as the family’s primary breadwinner. Her father, a cabdriver who was arrested
> along with her and held on immigration violations, stayed in detention until his deportation
> last month. Her mother, illiterate and speaking little English, soon lost the family business, a
> trinket stand.
>    
>   But under the strictures of the government’s curfew, Ms. Bah found she could not continue her
> education and at the same time earn enough to feed her four younger siblings, all American
> citizens. Last year, she dropped out of Heritage High, where teachers had praised her
> intellectual curiosity and generous spirit, and took up office work at Bellevue Hospital Center
> for $6.75 an hour.
>    
>   Her income fell far short of needs. And though a few community agencies tried to help with
> diapers for the youngest and trips to a food pantry, she said, the financial crisis deepened. In
> the end, it was an Islamic political activist in Maryland who came through, taking three of Ms.
> Bah’s siblings into his home for the summer, and paying $500 a month toward household expenses
> so she could attend summer school and re-enroll in Heritage this fall.
>    
>   “We were looking for other options, but nothing was working out,” Ms. Bah said. She added that
> she knew little about the politics of the activist, Mauri Saalakhan, 53, whom she met for the
> first time last fall when she and her mother stopped to pray at a downtown mosque after a
> session with lawyers at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, which is handling her asylum case without fee.
>    
>   Her family’s association with Mr. Saalakhan raised eyebrows this spring when he invited her to
> join spectators at the trial of a Pakistani immigrant accused — and eventually convicted — of
> plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in 2004. Ms. Bah, who was recognized by
> some reporters in the courtroom, said later that she went out of curiosity because people told
> her that the young man’s case was like hers. It was not, she said, and when she realized that,
> she did not go back.
>   Mainstream Islamic groups have looked askance at her family’s link to Mr. Saalakhan, an
> African-American who often accuses such groups of timidity, and whose criticism of government
> policies dates to a youthful stint with the Black Panthers. But, she said, “He’s somebody who
> stepped up and helped” when others seemed afraid or only offered services like counseling
> instead of money to pay the rent.
>    
>   For his part, Mr. Saalakhan says he is “a provocateur for truth and justice,” who loves
> America and has police officers in his family. He was happy to have Ms. Bah’s siblings Mohamed,
> 14, Mariama, 12, and Abdoul, 8, join him, his wife and teenage daughter for the summer near
> Washington, where he directs the Peace and Justice Foundation, “a grass-roots human rights
> organization.” 
>    
>   “What our government has put this family through is unconscionable,” he said.
>   But the volunteer lawyers who took over Ms. Bah’s asylum case last fall are leery of any
> effort to make her emblematic of larger issues, when government lawyers are raising no national
> security questions.
>    
>   “Right now all we have is a straightforward asylum claim,” said Bryan Lonegan, a lawyer with
> the Legal Aid Society’s immigration unit who is advising Hughes, Hubbard lawyers on the case.
> “This is a life and death situation for her.”
>    
>   The petition draws a grim picture of what she would face in Guinea as a young woman with
> intact genitalia who opposes the painful and dangerous practice of female genital mutilation. 
>    
>   In Guinea, “If a girl’s genitals are not mutilated, she is considered dirty, repulsive, unfit
> for marriage and motherhood, and devoid of morals and monetary value,” an expert, Hanny
> Lightfoot-Klein, wrote in an affidavit. Male relatives consider themselves dishonored, and will
> beat her until she submits, the affidavit added. “Elder women perform the procedure on dimly lit
> floors, with dull kitchen knives, glass shards, scissors or razor blades,” the affidavit said. 
>    
>   Ms. Bah’s mother, Aissatou Dalanda Bah, who has separately applied for asylum, had her
> clitoris excised by her grandmother with a kitchen knife when she was about 10, the court papers
> said. Later, she watched helplessly as one of Adama’s cousins bled to death from the procedure. 
>    
>   For Ms. Bah, who grew up absorbing American values and believing she was a legal immigrant,
> the prospect is terrifying and unreal. Genital mutilation “has nothing to do with my religion,”
> she said. “You can’t just circumcise a woman against her will, to take away her pleasure. That’s
> my right as a woman.” Her fear has become one more part of a day-to-day struggle to hold the
> family together, she said, as she repeatedly interrupted the interview to respond to her
> youngest brother, Saeed, 2. 
>    
>   “It’s hard to concentrate in school,” she said, explaining that she has missed many days this
> fall tending to the needs of her siblings, who now get public aid.
>   “In front of people,” she added, “you have to be this happy person, even though inside, it
> hurts.” At night, alone, she said, she allows herself to cry when she thinks about her family’s
> collapse, and about her judge: “Somebody who’s meeting me once, and making a decision for my
> lifetime.”
> 
> 
>  				
> ---------------------------------
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