Covid

MASKING SAVES LIVES

Thursday, May 10, 2007

TWM--Traveling While Muslim

"Zakariya Muhammad Reed spent 20 years serving in the National Guard. For the last eleven years, he’s been a firefighter in Toledo.

"But this hasn’t kept him from being viewed with suspicion by his own government.

“Now, not only am I being persecuted for my faith, but I’m being persecuted for a personal opinion. This is getting too Orwellian. Is this what it comes down to? Is this where I live? Is this the country I love?”

"Four times in the last six months, Reed has been detained coming over the border from Canada.

"He goes up there because his wife’s family lives in Ontario.

"The Canadians don’t bother him, he says. But the Americans do.

"His is just one of many such cases reported by Muslim Americans. The ACLU has a lawsuit pending against Homeland Security for its alleged religious and ethnic profiling.

"Reed’s case is a particularly eye-opening one.

"The first time, Reed, his wife, and their two small children were coming back at about 11:00 p.m, so the kids would be asleep, he says.

“'We pulled up to the booth at the Windsor-Detroit crossing,” he recalls. “They asked for my ID, I gave them my passport, they swiped it, and the there was a look of shock on the guard’s face as he closed the window. Suddenly, there were five guys surrounding the car with their hands on their weapons. They told me to turn the car off and keep my hands on the wheel, and they opened my door and led me into the building.”

"His wife and their two children had to come in and stay in a common area, he says, as border agents took him down the hall.

“'They put me up against the wall and frisked me and took everything in my pockets,” he says. “Then they put me in a four by eight foot room with two armed guards.”

"About a half hour later, he continues, “someone comes in with a legal size paper and asks me why I was in Canada and who I was seeing there. Then they noticed I’d changed my name.”

Found on Progressive.net

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