Trip turns into border nightmare
MUSLIM-CANADIAN FAMILY held for six hours at crossing with no explanation – and warned not to try entering U.S. again
It was supposed to be a cross-border-shopping-trip to New York state to break the monotony of a Quebec winter – a Montreal soccer dad, his wife, their adult son and their two youngest children packed in a car, headed toward Plattsburgh.
But when the Benaouda family got to the U.S. border, their outing turned into a scene from a bad movie – complete with shouting FBI agents, handcuffs, interrogation and six hours of unexplained detention.
The nightmare, which continues to replay in the Benaouda household, ended with a parting shot from a U.S. border official, warning that if they ever try to enter the United States again, they will get the same treatment.
More than a decade after 9/11, Muslim-canadian travellers with no proven links to terrorism continue to be targeted when they fly or try to cross into the U.S.
But why was Mohamed Benaouda, 56 – father of seven, Habs fan – forced from the family car by 10 or more U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the Champlain, N.Y., border crossing on Jan. 22?
Benaouda, a Canadian citizen with Algerian roots who says he has never had any run-ins with the law, was handcuffed, photographed, fingerprinted, held in a cell and interrogated.
He was given no explanation for his detention.
His son, Bachir, 22, a finalyear aerospace technology student at CÉGEP Édouard-Montpetit, and Mohamed’s wife, Aid-nadia, were photographed and fingerprinted. The two children, age 13 and 11, were spared.
But why was the travel ban imposed verbally by the border agent, leaving no paper trail for them to follow or to contest?
“If I was before a judge who judged me, I would accept that,” Mohamed said.
“Why did my children suffer this atrocity? So they can have files on me, on my family? What’s that about? It is an injustice.”
A call by The Gazette to the Champlain border crossing was re-directed to Rick Misztal, public affairs supervisor in the U.S. CBP’S Buffalo office.
“No arrests were made,” Misztal said. “No complaints have been filed. I have no other information whatsoever for you.”
Misztal would not explain how or why Benaouda was singled out, before the CBP agent looked at his passport.
Asked what recourse the Benaouda family members have to get the travel ban lifted, Misztal suggested: “They should contact whoever stated that.”
People refused entry to the U.S. may pay $545 U.S., nonrefundable, for a waiver or redress application that can take up to a year to process, according to the CBP.
Rochtassé, president of the Ottawa-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, said people seeking to reverse a U.S. travel ban often “get the runaround” and the ban stays on.
Tassé’s organization monitors reports by travellers of abusive treatment. He said the group is getting “many stories of a similar nature.”
Tassé called what happened to the Benaoudas “racial profiling” and guilt by association.
“You are associated with somebody who is associated with somebody who is associated with somebody.”
And he sees a pattern of people, who maybe had casual contact with someone on a watch list, or a no-fly list, for reasons U.S. or Canadian authorities do not explain, being banned themselves from crossing the border.
Tassé said imposing the ban verbally, with no written record, is the usual procedure, making it difficult for travellers to reverse the ban.
Edward Hasbrouck, an American suing his government for the right to see CBP files, said decisions by the U.S. border agency “are made in secret, based on secret dossiers, and are subject to no publicly disclosed standards.”
The agency is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The department says DHS TRIP – its Traveller Redress Inquiry Program – aims “to welcome legitimate travellers while still securing our country from those who want to do us harm.”
Mohamed Benaouda was given no opportunity to explain he was a “legitimate traveller.”
“They put me against the car,” he recalled of the Jan. 22 incident. “They put my hands behind my back. They searched me then they brought me inside. They put handcuffs on me.”
While the father was being shuffled inside, Bachir was left with his screaming, crying mother and siblings.
“Panic! Everyone was panicking,” Bachir recalled.
Arriving at the service point, the female CBP agent had asked, without looking at their passports, “Can you tell me who is with you?” Bachir said.
Bachir was driving because it was his car. A check of the vehicle registration would have returned the name of Bachir, not Mohamed.
“Beside me is my father; behind me is my mother and my little brother, my little sister,” Bachir replied.
“Before I finished presenting my little brother, my little sister … they took my father. They told him to get out of the vehicle with his hands up and all that.”
The elder Benaouda, who last crossed into the U.S. in 1995 or 1996, was interrogated about fellow Muslim immigrants, one of whom he only knew well enough to say hello to at a Montreal mosque 20 years ago and another he does not know.
“There is a certain community in Montreal,” Mohamed Benaouda said. “There is nothing exceptional there.”
While his wife and children tried in vain to find out what was going on with Mohamed, he himself had no better idea as he waited inside a borderstation cell handcuffed to a bar, his shoes removed.
“The way they jumped on me, it was like a scene in a movie.”
Mohamed is a qualified refrigeration technician, but driving a truck is his main occupation. He shares family chores and helps at his wife’s family daycare.
Mohamed said he rides his bike everywhere and is secretary of Soccer MHM, a multiethnic organization teaching soccer skills to about 1,000 children, age 5 to 18, in Montreal’s Mercier–hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough.
He and Aid-nadia have seven children. Only the two youngest and Bachir were on the Plattsburgh trip. Of the four others, one son is an engineer, a daughter is studying medicine at Mcgill and the remaining two are in CÉGEP.
In the interrogation room at the Champlain border crossing, two agents who flashed FBI badges, and Oussama Abdelaziz, an Arabic translator who works for the CBP, asked Mohamed about Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen who says he returned to his native Sudan in 2003 to visit his sick mother only to be arrested, tortured and beaten.
For a Kafkaesque period of more than a year, Abdelrazik lived in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum while officials denied him a passport.
The Federal Court finally ordered the government to allow him to return to Canada in 2009 and he is suing the Canadian government for $27 million.
Abdelrazik was never charged with any crimes in any country, but his name remained on the United Nations terrorist list until last November.
Benaouda explained that when he came to Montreal in the 1990s he and Abdelrazik attended the same mosque in Montreal North. “Is that wrong?” he asked. “He’s the one who was on television,” he told the FBI. “He was found innocent.”
Benaouda, who is more at ease in French, found it difficult to understand the Arabic translator, because he spoke Egyptian Arabic. And he wonders what the translator told the FBI.
The FBI agents showed him two pictures of another man he did not recognize.
Then they asked him if he knew “Abderraouf.”
He answered that he knew an Abderraouf Hanachi from the mosque.
“He is a Tunisian,” Mohamed told the FBI. “Everyone knows him. At the mosque we would say bonjour/bonsoir.”
Mohamed said he hasn’t seen Abderraouf in years, adding, “Outside the mosque I had no relations with him.
“They gave me a phone number. ‘If you see him, can you call us?’ ” he said, repeating the FBI request. “I told them yes.” The FBI may have been referring to Abderraouf Jdey, identified in a Wikileaks cable from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa as “a suspected alQaida-trained terrorist.”
Last seen in Turkey in 2002, the FBI has offered a $5-million reward for Jdey’s capture.
Informed of the reward for Jdey later by a Gazette reporter, Benaouda was flabbergasted.
He checked the Internet and recognized him as the same man in the pictures the FBI showed him.
But, he said of Jdey, “I don’t know him.”
Mohamed’s belongings, including his cellphone, were searched and an Air Algérie boarding pass was found in his wallet.
Mohamed went to Algeria Aug. 17, returning to Montreal Jan. 17.
“Why did you go to Algeria?” he was asked.
Mohamed explained his older brother was dying. After he died, wrapping up family business took longer than he expected.
But he flew to Algiers and back with no challenge from airline security, indicating his name was not on a no-fly list.
Confined with his mother and his two youngest siblings in a separate room, Bachir asked Abdelaziz, the translator, who went back and forth between Mohamed in his cell and the rest of his family, why they were being detained.
“Your father’s name is identical to that of someone else,” Abdelaziz said. “That is why we did this.”
“I asked, ‘But is my father under arrest?’ Because I saw him handcuffed.”
Abdelaziz replied, “No, he isn’t under arrest.”
Contacted by The Gazette, Abdelaziz refused to explain why the Benaouda family was detained.
“I cannot speak to anyone from the press,” he said.
Bachir was shaken by the difference between his previous U.S. welcome just weeks earlier, when he and his wife went to New York City for New Year’s Eve, and the unfolding drama this time.
He asked the translator what had changed.
“Now you have entered (the U.S.) with your father,” was the translator’s explanation.
Mohamed Benaouda is upset at how he and his family were treated, but he is especially worried about the potential impact the experience will have on his son.
Trans-border travel is a necessary part of jobs in the aerospace industry, his chosen field of study.
“That is finished now,” Bachir said, downcast.
“He is young. He has his future before him,” his father pointed out. “They have cut him off just as he is starting.”
And Bachir feels guilty because the Sunday jaunt to Plattsburgh was his idea.
Mohamed said his wife is anxious since the incident.
“My children cry at night,” he added. “They feel like criminals.
“I have always told my children Canada is your country. You should respect it. You should respect the laws,” he said.
“Did I immigrate from Algeria to have all these problems? It’s crazy. They have a record on my son, my wife. What did they do?
“Because I speak to people, I become a suspect?”