Judge orders government to make changes to terror watchlist

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — A federal judge is ordering the government to make changes to its watchlist of more than 1 million people whose inclusion marks them as known or suspected terrorists. But for now, he’s giving the government latitude to propose the changes as it sees fit.

The order issued last week by U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga

in Alexandria, Va., falls short of what a Muslim civil rights group had hoped for when it won a ruling this year that the secret list violates the constitutional rights of those placed on it.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations had asked Trenga to order specific, sweeping changes to the way the government places names on the list. It also wants a meaningful opportunity for those wrongly included to clear their names.

Instead, Trenga simply told the government to craft its own remedies to bring the list into compliance and to submit those proposals to him for review.

Trenga ordered the government to provide him a status report on its proposed revisions by early February.

Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he has little hope that the government will on its own propose any meaningful changes.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt the government is going to take a cynical approach to any type of watchlist revision,” he said. “We expect the government will be focused on maintaining its illegal program.”

The watchlist, also known as the Terrorist Screening Database, is maintained by the FBI and shared with a variety of federal agencies. Customs officers have access to the list to check people coming into the country at border crossings, and aviation officials use the database to help form the no-fly list, which is a much smaller subset of the broader watchlist.

As of June 2017, about 1.16 million people were on the watchlist, according to government documents filed in the lawsuit. In 2013, the number was only 680,000. The vast majority are foreigners, but according to the government, there are roughly 4,600 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents on the watchlist as of 2017.