Patriot Act clause allows authorities to block two other historians from entering the US

The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union today released new documents that indicate the government is broadly interpreting and using a controversial Patriot Act power known as the "ideological exclusion" provision to block people from entering the country. The ACLU is concerned that the provision is increasingly being used to target foreign scholars and others whose politics the government disfavors. Among those who are being blocked from entry is Dr. Waskar Ari, a scholar of race and ethnic studies and a member of the Aymara indigenous people in Bolivia and Iñaki Egaña, a Basque historian from Spain.

In Spring 2006, Dr. Waskar Ari was blocked from assuming a teaching position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Ari, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University, applied for a work visa after accepting the Nebraska offer in June 2005. More than a year later, U.S. immigration officials have yet to act on his visa application, but have since revoked his student visa, leaving Dr. Ari inadmissible to the country. The State Department recently said that Dr. Ari is being excluded on national security grounds, but it has not offered any evidence to support this allegation.

In March, Iñaki Egaña arrived at JFK airport with his two children with the intention of researching Basque people in the United States. Egaña and his family were detained while Egaña was questioned about Mario Salegi, a Basque political activist and writer whom Egaña had intended to study. After being detained for 24 hours, Egaña and his family were sent back to Spain.

A lawsuit challenging the provision is currently pending in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. That lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, NYCLU, AAUP, PEN and the American Academy of Religion, and charges that the provision is being used to prevent United States citizens and residents from hearing speech that is protected by the First Amendment. The groups filed the lawsuit after Professor Tariq Ramadan was barred from entering the United States, where he was offered a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. Although the government has since backed away from its claim that Professor Ramadan is inadmissible under the Patriot Act provision, on June 23, Judge Paul A. Crotty ruled that the government must act on Ramadan’s pending visa application, and that it cannot bar non-citizens from the United States simply because it disagrees with their political views.