Ibrahim Parlak

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin takes the Bush administration to task over its unwarranted detention of Turkish immigrant Ibrahim Parlak.

Parlak is the Harbert, Mich., restaurateur who until June of this year was locked up for 10 months in an immigration jail because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had suddenly decided he was a terrorist. Never mind that back in 1992, the United States granted him political asylum. Back then immigration officials saw him as a Kurdish freedom fighter who had been persecuted, imprisoned and tortured. We welcomed him into this country.

But in the post-9/11 war on terrorism, a lot of things got redefined and one of them was Ibrahim Parlak, whom the feds arrested in July of 2004. Because the Kurdish resistance movement to which he once belonged had been reclassified by the State Department as a terrorist enterprise, suddenly Parlak was reclassified too.

Because immigration judges work for the Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general of the United States, they are in no way part of an independent court system. Parlak lost every one of his battles in immigration court. It was not until a truly independent judge, Avern Cohn in U.S. District Court in Detroit, got the case that he had a chance. Judge Cohn made mincemeat of the government's ridiculous assertions that Parlak was a threat to anyone and released him.

And now the U.S. is trying to deport Parlak's brother.

U.S. Immigration Court Judge Robert Newberry has just ruled that Huseyin Parlak, 38, be deported to Turkey. Officials want him out of the country in 90 days. Huseyin Parlak, who was here on a student visa, had also applied for but was denied political asylum, even though he faces the same danger his brother does if he returns to Turkey, where the Parlak family is known to be sympathetic to the Kurdish resistance.

Why exactly did immigration officials decide to throw the book at Huseyin Parlak? Could it have anything to do with the fact that they lost their latest battle with Ibrahim Parlak?

"No," says Greg Palmore, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Detroit, "these are two separate cases. It is not the government reacting to Ibrahim Parlak's case."

I'm sure.

This is an administration that doesn't know how to admit mistakes. Not mistakes about intelligence failures or weapons of mass destruction or estimates about the cost or duration of an Iraqi war. And certainly not mistakes about whom we arrest and whom we detain in behalf of making us feel safe within our own borders.

Marin concludes:

Somewhere along the line, we need to remember once again that we are a nation of immigrants. And even in times of terror, we have to keep our head about who is a threat and who is not. And care about making careful decisions.

Amen!