Seattle imam suing over mysterious FBI watchlist

Seattle Muslim leader Farid Sulayman said it was the usual drill for him last month when he flew to California to chaperone a youth basketball tournament. Checking in online proved impossible. At the ticket counter, he got a boarding pass with a special stamp — “SSSS” — indicating he would need an extra security screening.

He was told to go to a specific line, where federal agents ushered him past everyone else to search, as he put it, “every inch of my bag.” He felt all eyes on him.

At the gate, he found more Transportation Security Administration agents ostensibly conducting a random passenger search, which he found hard to believe because one agent walked straight to him, he said.

On international trips, Sulayman said, border agents have pulled him aside for private questioning as soon as he stepped off the plane. And once, the 46-year-old imam — an American citizen who helps lead religious services at a South Seattle mosque, works for a nonprofit and drives for Uber on the side — tried to pick up a passenger at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Upon presenting his ID, Sulayman said, he was handcuffed and detained for over two hours.

Sulayman said an official at the gate told him he’d been identified as a “possible threat.” Why? It’s a question Sulayman says he’s been wondering for decades.

The imam believes he’s been put onto a federal government watchlist aimed at identifying known or suspected terrorists attempting to travel into or throughout the U.S. But he’s received no confirmation or explanation, typical of roughly a million people — according to an estimate by the Council on American-Islamic Relations — who share a similar fate.

Sulayman and dozens of others nationwide are suing the U.S. government in Maryland’s federal court over what they say are constitutional violations in a watch-listing system that puts people under permanent suspicion “without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes.”

“We’re hoping that Farid’s case is the one that ends the watchlist,” said CAIR lawyer Gadeir Abbas, adding that it’s the biggest such lawsuit ever brought.

There are actually many watchlists, but feeding most of them is an FBI database that’s often colloquially referred to as “the” watchlist. It contains names of U.S. and foreign citizens.

Shared with many U.S. and foreign government agencies, local law enforcement and some private corporations such as banks, it contains names of citizens around the world and can affect someone’s ability to travel, get a visa to the U.S., access credit and get a job, according to the lawsuit.

The government created the watchlist in 2003, at a time of heightened fear of terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. The need to more carefully monitor who came into the U.S. seemed apparent amid the wreckage and mourning. Some counterterrorism analysts say it is still necessary, if flawed.

Yet after 9/11, generalized and unfair suspicion, according to critics, fell upon Muslims, including American citizens. Many were detained for questioning, spied upon and added to the FBI database.

Some of these practices quietly continue, including the watchlist, which this year marks its 20th anniversary. In the last fiscal year, running through September 2022, border officials reported 478 encounters with people on the watchlist, and the current fiscal year’s numbers are already higher.