Immigration Law as Anti-Terrorism Tool

For example, ICE agents alleged in federal court in Alexandria that investor Soliman S. Biheiri had done business through the mid-1990s with a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which is on the U.S. terrorism list. But the statute of limitations had expired.

Prosecutors instead charged Biheiri with putting false information on his citizenship application. Biheiri, an Egyptian immigrant, has denied any improper dealings with Hamas. He was convicted and was sentenced to a year in jail, and is to be deported soon.

Homeland Security officials say immigration charges are being used much as they have been for years against drug traffickers -- as a tool to lock up suspects, gain informants and obtain search warrants. But some legal experts caution it can be harder to identify a terrorist than a narcotics kingpin.

"So much of national security threat analysis is guesswork," said Bo Cooper, who was general counsel of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. Authorities will often have worrisome information "but not nearly enough to prove this person is a terrorist. . . . So whether it's legitimate depends on whether the person appears to be a risk, and whether he indeed violated immigration laws."

Some say the new focus in the immigration bureaucracy is long overdue. Bill West, a Miami-based immigration agent who handled national security cases in the 1990s, recalled urging the agency's leaders to make counterterrorism a higher priority. "It all fell on deaf ears," said West, who is retired.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, there were only 50 immigration agents on Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country, according to the Sept. 11 commission, which has criticized the immigration service for being slow to embrace a role in counterterrorism.

Today, the task forces include more than 200 such agents, who report to a bustling ICE Counterterrorism Section in downtown Washington. Since ICE was founded in March 2003, more than 500 people have been charged with immigration violations -- either in criminal or immigration courts -- after an initial report linking them to a terrorism or homeland security threat, according to an agency spokesman, Dean Boyd.

Some of the immigrants faced other criminal charges. Boyd emphasized that some immigrants were found to have no connection to terrorism.

Boyd provided the estimated total after The Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the number of cases and the immigrants' names and countries of origin. The agency denied the request, saying the data had not been compiled in any existing documents.

Among those accused of immigration fraud are at least 10 naturalized Americans, according to a tally by The Post based on court records, ICE documents and news reports. Khalil is among them. According to the charges, he failed to acknowledge in his 1999 naturalization application that he had been arrested and ordered out of the United States eight years earlier for overstaying his student visa.

Khalil disputes the accusation. He said he obtained a document in the early 1990s shielding him from deportation because of the war raging in Lebanon. He married his wife, a U.S. citizen, in 1994 and became a legal resident.

But the case is about more than a 14-year-old deportation issue.