A Tale of Two Deportation Cases

By Bill West

There is the enlightening, if disheartening, story of Ahmed Zaoui in New Zealand. Zaoui, an Algerian, arrived in New Zealand in 2002 traveling on a false passport and was summarily arrested and detained as an illegal alien. He sought refugee status there. His immigration case has been pending in various New Zealand immigration and judicial proceedings ever since. Zaoui spent a good amount of the past five years detained, based partly on classified (“secret”) evidence the New Zealand government claims relates to Zaoui being a national security threat. Zaoui has since been freed on bail pending further litigation. The outcome of his immigration case remains uncertain. What is clear is that New Zealand, a liberal Western democracy, has likely expended millions from its treasury and nearly five years trying to determine if just one illegal entrant alien who is also suspected of being a national security threat should be allowed to remain in their country.

Before any American reacts with too much disbelief at the handling of the Zaoui case by our Kiwi cousins, we would do well to remember the case of Mazen Al-Najjar. Al-Najjar is the brother-in-law of convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) supporter Sami Al-Arian. Al-Najjar was deported from the US (finally) in 2002...ironically the same year Zaoui arrived in New Zealand...after what was a seven year legal battle by the US Government to remove him from the United States. Like Zaoui, the Al-Najjar case involved multi-year detention based in part on classified evidence and a lengthy public drama pitting his supporters, and most of the media, against the Feds. In the end, the Al-Najjar case boiled down to the US Government deporting an illegal alien who had overstayed his student visa by nearly two decades and who was suspected of being a national security risk. Many years and probably millions of taxpayer dollars were required to remove that one illegal alien. Unfortunately, cases like Zaoui and Al-Najjar are not so rare.

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