Man Without a Country

To his supporters, Farouk Abdel Muhti is a Palestinian rights activist caught up in the mass deportation of Muslim immigrants following Sept. 11, and he is being unjustly detained because he is a critic of the government. His case has garnered special attention because he often appeared on New York radio station WBAI, and he went on a hunger strike in January for the right to hug his children during visits at the Passaic County Jail. Muhti, who has been in jail for 11 months for being here illegally, is so charming he can get the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah on the phone any time he wants, his friends say. But Muhti is not the martyr his comrades portray him to be, says the U.S. Attorney’s Office in papers filed in federal district court in Newark. He’s a confidence trickster with a lengthy criminal record – including an accusation of rape – who did not pay taxes in three decades, the papers claim. And Muhti may not even be a Palestinian: He has used 10 names, claimed to be a citizen of at least three countries, and has a birth certificate and a passport from Honduras. He has been disingenuous for decades about almost everything in his life, even his real date of birth and the whereabouts of his children, to everyone he knows, the papers state. Muhti’s background has emerged as a result of his habeas corpus petition filed last November against his detention by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In an interview from his jail cell in York County, Pennsylvania, Muhti did not specifically deny the allegations but says they are being used to distract people from what he calls a political prosecution. “It’s an assassination of my character,” he says. “I’m a victim, I need my rights.” Muhti’s supporters say they were not aware of his history when they first rallied behind him. But they are sticking by him. Since his arrest last April, the Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti has amassed an impressive pile of sympathetic news clippings – from the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Record of Hackensack, and The Herald News of West Paterson. The committee called for an “emergency demonstration” last Friday outside the jail in York County, Pa., where he is being held. His legal representation is being handled by the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing attorney group. His supporters include the Socialist Workers Party; Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), an Asian rights group; Refuse and Resist!, a radical artists’ and lawyers’ group; and The Militant, a leftist newspaper. “It seems that the National Lawyers Guild has made him their poster boy, but I’m not sure they were aware of the extent of his criminal history and his history with immigration,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calcagni. Reached during the past two weeks, comrades of Muhti’s indeed seemed surprised at the evidence against him. “We’ve never heard of that,” says Namita Chad, a community organizer at DRUM, referring to his convictions, which date back to 1965 and include simple assault, harassment, resisting arrest and unlawful re-entry. Chad says Muhti’s lawyer, Joel Kupferman of New York, told her “briefly” about his case but “not about his many different names.” Kupferman did not return three calls for comment. A friend of Muhti’s, Daniel Vila, adds, “I’ve never heard him say he was a Honduran national.” Shifting Identities Muhti’s story – at least as far as the federal government is concerned – starts in April 1964,when he was arrested for selling rugs on the street without a permit and handed over to the INS in Newark. He told officials that his name was George Nasser, that his parents were Honduran citizens and that he was born in La Ceiba on June 25, 1944. He produced a passport from Honduras and was deported there by the end of the month. The next year, he was arrested by the INS in Chicago. This time he said his name was Jorge Alberto Muhti-Nasser and that he had been born on June 17, 1944, in Puerto Rico. That story fell apart when the INS showed him his fingerprints from the previous arrest, and in November 1965 he deported himself to Lima, Peru, based on his conviction for unlawfully re-entering the country and his two-year suspended sentence, the U.S. attorney alleges. In 1972, he was arrested in New York after he allegedly attacked a police officer who tried to issue him a summons when he was caught vandalizing the inside of a subway car. In August, he was convicted of harassment, police department records show. At the time, he said he was Firuk Muhti, born Aug. 3, 1943. “Having masked his true identity . . . petitioner was released and never turned over to federal authorities,” the government’s papers say. Three years later, Muhti was arrested again and for the first time claimed to be a Palestinian, born on Sept. 15, 1944, in the West Bank. He gave his name as Faruk Mahmoud Abdel Muhti. When Muhti was ordered deported a third time, the Israeli Consul was unable to verify his citizenship and in 1976 denied his request for a travel document. He was released into INS supervision. In 1982, the INS finally persuaded Israel to take Muhti and told him he would be deported. But “the Service was unable to locate him. He had absconded,” the government’s papers say. A decade later, he was back in New York. In 1993, Muhti’s wife filed rape, assault and sexual abuse charges with the New York City Police Department. The police report states, “He punched her about her face and body. Suspect did cut her on the left side of face and forcibly raped complainant.” Muhti sidesteps questions about the incident, which he says stemmed from a domestic dispute about the custody of one of his three sons. “This is a family issue [the INS is raising] to try and cover up [the fact that] the INS [has kept me] in here for more than 10 months,” he says. He pleaded guilty to simple assault and spent 27 days on Rikers Island, telling authorities again that he was from Honduras. “When you go to the court and you have no experience, all the time you feel guilty. And when you say ‘guilty’ you give away your rights without understanding the law,” Muhti says. The INS made another effort to deport him to Honduras, which fell by the wayside when he changed his mind and told INS officials he was Palestinian. Between the Cracks In 1994, an immigration judge rendered a lengthy opinion to try to summarize everything the government knew about Muhti. Judge Alan Page of New York described the case as “long and tortured” and started by admitting that Muhti had eluded the INS because his case “basically fell between the cracks.” Page had difficulty with his findings of fact, however. “Clearly, there was a question as to how old he was and when he was born,” Page wrote. “The only thing for certain, or at least the only thing that this Court is certain of, is that the respondent was arrested by the New York City Police Department on May 7th, 1993.” He also noted that Muhti had not paid taxes since entering the country. Amazingly, in retrospect, Page released Muhti on a $15,000 bond despite noting that he was “a substantial bail risk.” Page’s misgivings turned out to be correct. Muhti was arrested again in 1995 for resisting arrest and obstructing a government office in New York – a charge often made against political protesters. He pleaded guilty to resisting on Sept. 6 of that year and was ordered to attend deportation proceedings. He did not show up, and was ordered deported – his fifth such order – to Israel in absentia. Muhti spent the next seven years making friends in New York’s activist community. “I first met Farouk during the Giuliani administration,” says his friend Vila, when the two became part of a committee urging the mayor be removed from office. “We were disgusted by the way [Rudy] Giuliani behaved toward people of color, in particular police brutality was very vicious during this period.” Muhti, who speaks Spanish and Arabic, found himself acting as a translator on WBAI during call-in shows about the Middle East. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, focused the INS’s attention on Muslims and Arabs living in the United States illegally. And in April 2002, Muhti was arrested at the apartment of a friend in Queens for being here illegally. “We don’t know where he’s from,” says Calcagni. “Until we’ve resolved it, we don’t where to repatriate him to.” The Consulate of Honduras is investigating his Honduran citizenship claim, Calcagni says. “By presenting yet another birth certificate to authorities [this one from Ramallah in the West Bank], there is an issue whether he’s from Jordan, Israel or Honduras.” Jordan has concluded that Muhti is not one of its citizens, and has refused to provide him with travel papers. Still in Motion Muhti’s friends are focusing their anger on the fact that he has been repeatedly transferred from jail to jail as a punishment for his complaints about detention conditions. At one point, according to The Herald News, he was shuttled among Camden, Middlesex and Passaic so often that the INS briefly lost track of where he was. He was among six Muslims who began a hunger strike in Passaic in January, demanding better access to their children during visiting hours. All the protesters were eventually moved to the Hudson County Jail, where such access is permitted. On Feb. 26, however, Muhti was moved to York County, Pa., 187 miles from his New York attorney. The York jail is keeping him in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, according to another friend and organizer, Jeannette Gabriel. He is in solitary because he threatened to organize another hunger strike among the York inmates, an INS spokesman says. The conditions are “absolutely horrible,” says Gabriel. She met Farouk when they founded an immigrant workers’ rights committee in 1998. She also did not know of Muhti’s history, she says, but adds, “It was never a secret that Farouk had lived in many places.” “Farouk always portrayed himself to be a Palestinian and I believe he’s a Palestinian. He’s a very strong fighter for the Palestinians regardless of where his papers might be from,” she says. Gabriel predicted in October that the INS might move him out of state to reduce his visibility – protests for Muhti have been held outside the Passaic County Jail and in front of Newark’s Penn Station, and he has tried to organize detainee protests inside the jails. Muhti has made it clear, however, that he believes his re-assignment among Northeastern jails is an attempt to silence him. “They shut me down here,” he says. Curiously, even Calcagni admits that Muhti may eventually win his freedom. If Muhti is a Palestinian, it could well be that his birth documentation has been lost or destroyed as his alleged hometown, Ramallah, has been under British, Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian rule through decades of conflict. It is unlikely the Israelis would accept an undocumented Palestinian. In that situation, the precedent set in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001), would kick in. The holding allows the release of a detainee the INS cannot deport where the alternative would be an illegal indefinite detention. “Here’s a person who says and does anything to remain in this country,” Calcagni says. “We have a proven track record of not being able to repatriate someone there, so it becomes the country du jour. This guy’s a master manipulator.”