San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Post-9/11 civil rights path for two Muslim women
As dusk fell on Sept. 11, 2001, 3,000 miles from the smoldering World Trade Center site, Shirin Sinnar and her husband rushed to a meeting in the South Bay. Around a table in a well-lit room, members of their local Muslim community attempted to process what had happened through a cloud of grief and disbelief.
“It was clear that this was a colossal event,” Sinnar recalled. “It was mostly a shocked reaction, and confusion around what would come next.”
A second-year Stanford University law student, Sinnar mostly listened as others spoke. She heard that the suspects were quickly linked to Islam, that no one knew if more attacks were coming, that many people were scared of being scapegoated because of their ethnicity or faith.
What she didn’t hear was anyone with a legal background speak. An idea began to form, one that would steer her life for years to come.
More than 300 miles south, 17-year-old Zahra Billoo woke
up on Sept. 11, 2001, to a call from her dad telling her to turn on the TV. He told the freshman at California State University Long Beach not to leave the house because the headscarf she wore made her a “visible Muslim.” So Billoo stayed home, feeling sick about what unfolded on her television screen.
The next day she returned to class, to stories that the FBI was on campus questioning students. Without knowing it, both Sinnar and Billoo had started journeys that would take them to the center of pivotal civil rights battles over the powers of the state and the rights of the Muslim community in California.
“I came of age almost right away as an American Muslim activist,” Billoo said.
The two young students would find their lives transformed by a single day. Their Islamic faith was about to come under attack, their neighbors’ lives upended by surveillance, profiling and detention. And the community to which they belong would come together in surprising ways to build a resistance movement over the next two decades.
After that first meeting on 9/11, Sinnar connected with a small group of attorneys and law students who together formed the Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers. What she didn’t anticipate was just how quickly her phone would ring with desperate calls for help.
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The rapid arrest and detention of Muslims, South Asians and Arabs in the aftermath of 9/11 is now well documented. News coverage, reports by civil liberties groups and the government’s own investigation paint a stark picture of broad sweeps through immigrant communities. More than 1,000 people were arrested, and 80,000 were registered and interviewed based solely on their countries of origin.
As authorities scrambled to figure out how to guard the nation, former FBI agent Michael German said regard for the rule of law seemed to disappear. Congress passed the Patriot Act intending to prevent further terrorism, yet it allowed for a significant easing of intelligence gathering rules.
“At the FBI, there was this feeling, as somebody said to me, ‘The handcuffs are off us. We can now do whatever we want,’ ” said German, now a Brennan Center for Justice fellow focusing on intelligence and law enforcement reform. German left the FBI in 2004 and testified before Congress about what he believed was internal mismanagement.
Federal authorities, aided by local police in many cases, began an aggressive campaign of counterterrorism that often went wrong. Among the highest-profile examples came in 2005, when the FBI announced the presence of an al Qaeda sleeper cell in the Central Valley city of Lodi (San Joaquin County). Two imams were detained on immigration violations, and a young man, Hamid Hayat, was arrested on charges of training with terrorists in Pakistan.
What was not made clear, at least initially, was that the case against Hayat had the hallmarks of many others of its era: The FBI had relied on a paid informant who befriended Hayat, speaking of “jihad” in an attempt to get him to express radical sentiments, and on a marathon interrogation in which agents asked the young man questions before producing what
Zahra Billoo works on outreach for the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations at the Yaseen Burlingame Center.
defense attorneys called a false confession.
After Hayat’s arrest, reports quickly emerged of a heavy FBI presence in rural Lodi. The Council on AmericanIslamic Relations invited Sinnar and three other female attorneys to conduct a knowyour-rights training for the area’s Muslim community at a
Zahra Billoo, attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations mosque in nearby Stockton.
“There were FBI vehicles literally circling the mosque during the evening,” Sinnar remembered. “They had apparently followed some folks they were interrogating from Lodi to Stockton, and they persisted in circling the mosque during the evening. It was scary.”
Inside the mosque, Sinnar said that one man told her the FBI followed his children as they bought ice cream. Another was anxious because his
son had studied at a religious school in Pakistan. Sinnar and the other attorneys tried to assure him that wasn’t sufficient grounds to be arrested. But Sinnar couldn’t entirely cut through the fear. She felt it herself.
“I remember as we left the mosque ... feeling a palpable sense of relief the further I got from Stockton,” Sinnar said. “It’s as if my body had internalized the fear and the surveillance, and only with physical distance could I feel myself begin to even relax a little.” Around this time, Billoo moved to the Bay Area to study law at UC Hastings. After graduation, she was hired by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Bay Area office, where many of those seeking help had experienced similar instances of profiling by authorities. One of them was a Santa Clara student who discovered a GPS device on his car. When he posted a picture of it on the internet, the FBI asked for it back. Billoo and her colleagues took his case to the news media, and to court.
“We did media coverage,” Billoo said. “Then we sued them, so there was more media coverage.”
Like Sinnar, Billoo spent much of her time teaching members of the Muslim community about their rights. Mosques were good places to reach large audiences, yet traditional gender barriers made the work challenging.
“There just wasn’t a familiarity or comfort with women speakers,” Billoo said.
Over the years, Billoo said, she saw such obstacles break down because of the information she and other women brought.
Toward the end of the decade, Sinnar found herself confronting the limits of the law as she battled for her clients’ civil rights.
“Most of the cases that I worked on didn’t succeed,” she said. From the Fijian Indian father and son who were not allowed on a flight because they made a flight attendant “uncomfortable,” to suing on behalf of individuals mistakenly associated with terrorist watch lists, “often we couldn’t even get into court because the courts have created all of these barriers to even hearing legal challenges when the government asserts that national security is involved.”
In 2012, Sinnar joined Stanford University’s faculty as a law professor, specializing in civil rights and the legal treatment of political violence.
In 2019, Hayat’s conviction was overturned and he was freed after 14 years in prison. Authorities never found a terrorist sleeper cell in Lodi. It was a profound, if belated, victory for the Muslim community.
“I came of age almost right away as an American Muslim activist.”
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Billoo was on high alert. After a long campaign of public insults and threats against the Muslim community, Donald Trump was running the country. Just days into his presidency in 2017, Trump signed an executive order banning entry to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“In those early hours there was panic,” Billoo said.
Yet she and other civil rights attorneys had been preparing for this. They knew they had to get down to San Francisco International Airport as flights from these countries arrived.
What Billoo did not anticipate was how many others would converge at SFO to protest the ban.
“Every inch of the international arrivals terminal at the airport felt like it was covered
in people with signs expressing solidarity with Muslims,” Billoo said. “It felt comforting to know that we weren’t alone in this fight.”
The path to that mass airport protest was hard-won. In the decade before Trump took office, Bay Area Muslims had led and achieved success in some important local battles against government surveillance of their communities.
Post 9/11, the San Francisco Police Department began collaborating with the FBI through its Joint Terrorism Task Force. Like local police across the country, officers were deputized to operate using FBI rules instead of local ones.
“After 9/11, the FBI’s rules were diluted significantly, both in legislation like the Patriot Act and in the attorney general guidelines that govern FBI investigations,” said German, the former FBI agent.
This worried many in the Muslim community. In 2008, a San Rafael man of Yemeni descent found a GPS tracking device on his car.
Abdo Alwareeth said it was local police who came to claim it. Local laws would not permit this kind of police activity unless there were suspicion of criminal activity, activists contended.
Then, in March 2012, the ACLU obtained records showing extensive law enforcement activity at Bay Area mosques, where information on worshipers had been collected and retained. This was the final straw for activists.
Two months later, they helped push through passage of the Safe San Francisco Civil Rights ordinance, requiring police officers participating in the joint task force program to follow state and local laws.
Still, in 2014, Samrad Gilani, a software engineer at Google,
related an unsettling experience. He had been questioned at work by a San Francisco police officer and a federal official about his parents’ homeland — Pakistan — and what he knew of a U.S. Army sergeant they believed was being held captive there. According to Hammad Alam of the Asian Law Caucus, this was a stark example where the Police Department violated the ordinance by “asking him questions about his religious and political beliefs, when neither the FBI nor the SFPD suspected him of any wrongdoing.”
Activists were angry, and pressure mounted. Finally, in 2017, newly hired Police Chief Bill Scott ended the federal task force collaboration. San Francisco became only the second city after Portland, Ore., to do this.
“SFPD’s withdrawal would not have been possible without sustained advocacy and vigilance,” Alam said.
Yet with Trump’s presidency came the threat of harsh policies directed at the Muslim community.
Billoo saw many stepping up to join the fight, from the thousands protesting at the airport to the women who prepared and delivered meals to nourish them.
“They may not be lawyers, they may not be community organizers, and frankly, they may not even be able to donate, but they can make a little bit of extra food,” Billoo said. As Trump continued to target Muslims, a coalition of groups mounted a new campaign, this time to end the Oakland Police Department’s collaboration with the FBI task force.
Advocates pointed to the targeting of activists during last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations as another example of overzealous investigations.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force “was actually being mobilized against BLM activists,” Alam said.
The Oakland City Council ended the Police Department’s partnership with the FBI in October 2020; testimony from Muslims helped make the case.
These victories illustrate the power Bay Area Muslims have been able to build over the past two decades, said Sinnar, who recently welcomed a new class of Stanford law students. “9/11 was transformative for Muslim American communities.”
Billoo agrees and is looking forward to passing the torch to a younger generation of Muslims, who are in a different place than she was as a freshman on Sept. 11, 2001.
“They’re not growing up as victims, and they’re not growing up as visitors,” she said. “They are growing up as engaged members of our society.”