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AI: And so maybe this would be a time where you could tell about what happened with the money transfer businesses and the groceries, and also in this time period is when Congress passed the Patriot Act.

PJ: That's right.

AI: So-called Patriot Act.

PJ: In October, yeah. Well, there were a series of actions that happened after September 11th, and the Patriot Act was one of those. It gets a lot of the focus for, for how immigrants were targeted, but in fact, it's probably the act that has had really the least amount of actual impact on immigrants. So it's still a huge impact on citizens' rights in general and civil liberties in general, but in terms of the attacks on immigrants, it was a series of actions, some of them passed by the Attorney General's office, not even through Congress.

The Somali grocery stores actually started with the Somali money transmitter businesses, which I think was in October. Pretty sure it was in October, it was about a month after September 11th. And what happened is that there are, money transmitter businesses are these small businesses that essentially transmit money to places that Western Union won't transfer money to. So, people come in and, like for example, you identify your, who you want to transfer the money to and where they are and then you say what tribe they're in, because it operates through this complex network of people who get the money on the other end and know the tribe and know the family and actually take it and hand-deliver it. So, the U.S., I believe it was the Treasury, U.S. Treasury Department decided that there was a connection between al-Qaida and these informal networks of money transmitters, one in particular called al-Barakaat. And al-Barakaat is located in one place but then they have branches all around the country and it's sort of like it's franchised out. And so they started to crack down on money transmitter business around the country, al-Barakaat branches around the country. And there happened to be a money transmitter business here in Seattle that was located on the same premise as a grocery store that belonged to a Somali man. And they, they had nothing to do with each other but they shared the space. And the feds came in and raided the money transmitter business, but also raided the grocery store because it was on the same premise, and took about a hundred thousand dollars worth of dry goods down to the dump, just emptied the freezers out, took their freezers, took all of the, everything that was in the store and took it down to the dump, literally. And the grocery store owner was a man name Nur, Ali Nur. And he, the community got together and launched this big protest. And there were rallies and I really wasn't involved. I went to the rallies 'cause it was just a couple of blocks down from where I lived, and a couple of blocks from our office, actually, our current office. And so I was involved in that way, but I wasn't really, at that time wasn't really thinking about how Hate Free Zone was gonna address these government issues. We didn't really know that much about it.

And so that happened, and the ACLU took on Ali Nur's case and managed, ultimately, I think, six or nine months later, to get back about forty thousand dollars. They took it on pro bono, which was really wonderful. So that happened and so there was this big to-do. And in the meantime, I had met with John McKay, who's the U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, head Justice Department person, and talked about that. And he was mortified that that had happened. That never should have happened without his knowledge, it was actually the U.S. Customs and Treasury Department that conducted that raid, but they never went through his office. So there was this complete lack of communication between the different federal agencies. About... a few weeks after that, maybe a month after that, Mahdi Mahweel, who runs Somalisan TV came to our office and said that three grocery store owners had received the same letter form the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, saying that they were allegedly involved in food stamp trafficking and therefore they were going to be disqualified from the Food Stamp program. Now, about ninety percent of their customers or clients are food stamp recipients and so if they don't, if they can't accept food stamps, then their businesses are effectively shut down. And they were in a panic. And they said, "What is this about? We don't understand. What can we do?"

And so we, I remember going to an emergency meeting on a Friday night at the Somali Community Center and hearing about what was going on and thinking this is really funny, the letters are all exactly the same, they were all received on the exact same day, they were all to Halal grocery stores, Muslim grocery stores that sell Halal meat, which is meat prepared in accordance with the Koran. And, as I started looking at it, they were all located next to money transmitter businesses. And so we started doing research around the country and we found that there were actually seven grocery stores that had received similar letters in a similar timeframe, exactly the same letter, all Halal, all located next to money transmitter businesses that had been raided by the feds before. And it seemed very, very suspicious. And so we were able to get, we started to launch these big community campaigns, we had rallies. We had this amazing rally outside one of the grocery stores where this group of Somali women came and took over the mike and started speaking in Somali about what this was doing to their families, because ninety percent of the community shops at these stores, and they can't go to other stores to shop. So it had huge impact on the whole community.

And so that was kind of the beginning of the campaign. We ended up getting Perkins Coie, major law firm in town to take on the case pro bono and challenge the USDA, and there were all kinds of things that happened in the process where we realized that this was really connected back to some belief on the government's part that these stores were connected in with the money transmitters and with terrorism. They never admitted that, but, and they did end up dropping the charges and saying, "Oh, sorry, we were wrong." Which was something that we would hear many, many times over the next two years, "Oops, sorry, we were wrong." But that doesn't fix the damage that's been done in the meantime.

AI: And so while some of this is going on, of course, what was also going on in the larger global picture is that the U.S. had demanded the extradition of Osama bin Laden.

PJ: Right.

AI: And Afghanistan, from Afghanistan, which was refused. And the U.S. then, military --

PJ: Went to war.

AI: -- went into Afghanistan. So that also was underway as some of these other actions that you're describing from the federal government.

PJ: Right, that was going on internationally. And domestically, sort of tied to that, Muslim and Arab men were being interviewed. There were twelve hundred Muslim and Arab men that were held in detention without any notice or attorneys provided immediately following September 11th. Then there were interviews of approximately over three thousand Arab and Muslim men that the FBI was conducting. And so that was all happening at the same time and there was just this general chaos and picture that if you were Muslim, if you were Arab, if you even looked like a Muslim or Arab -- you didn't have to be either -- that you were suspicious and that the United States somehow had the right to believe that you were suspicious, because in order to protect our national security, we had to be suspicious of anybody who was in that broad category. So there was this hysteria, fear, a number of programs that were instituted by the government encouraging people to report "suspicious activity," which was people who looked different from them. And it was all tied to this global war on terror. You know, so there was Afghanistan, later to be Iraq, and then the domestic actions, which were all very, very connected and if you look at later the U.S. national security strategy document, which is the U.S. foreign policy, which for the first time laid out this notion of preemptive strike. Really, domestically, that was the same thing that we were doing, is the preemptive strike and, of course, very similar to our historical experience of who is really to be trusted in this country, and who does the suspicion turn to immediately, whether or not they're U.S. citizens, whether or not they're productive, contributing members of society.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.