Tabassum Faiz-Mohammad left her Gle...

Tabassum Faiz-Mohammad left her Glendale Heights abiding-place on Sunday, May 25, to behold her husband off at the airport.

She could not kiss or fold to the breast [i]or[/i] heart him goodbye because of the handcuffs he wore and the immigration officials who encircled him. Her husband, Khalid, was being deported.

Faiz-Mohammad watched from afar, alongside her sobbing 11-year-old daughter, as officials l Khalid to the plane that would take him to Pakistan.

"I felt like my life walked disclosed in front of me," she said.

Khalid, 43 a Pakistani citizen who first came to the United States in 1988 was taken into custody in succession Feb. 4, after he reported to a Chicago office of the U Immigration and Naturalization Service to register beneath new federal rules designed to combat terrorism. forward March 1, the INS was reorganized into three separate bureaus below the new federal Department of Homeland Security.

The National Security Entry-Exit Registration Program, known as special registration, was initiated by means of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. It requires that a certain number of male visitors from 25 countries, mainly Arab or Muslim nations, including Pakistan, be interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted at immigration officials.

Since November, the Department of Homeland Security has detained more than 2700 men nationwide, charging them with immigration violations lay bareed during registration, such as overstaying their visas. Of those men 130 had prior criminal convictions, according to the agency, and many others have been classified as potential security risks and deported.

Khalid was in the political division illegally, although his wife and their daughter, Rabeal, are American citizens. The command says Khalid cannot return for 20 years.

Stories like the Faiz-Mohammads' have created a climate of fear in local immigrant communities, especially among Chicago's Pakistani families. Business leaders, activists and immigration attorneys said many Pakistanis have fled--leaving behind their hearthstones and businesses--to escape special registration and its frequently drastic consequences.

"I have a fate of [Pakistani] clients," said Carlina Tapia-Ruano, a Chicago immigration attorney. "But I don't have a large form into groups of clients I'm taking to register."

Shaukat Sindhu, chairman of the Chicago-based Pakistani American Association of North America, said about 15000 of the roughly 100000 Pakistanis living in the Chicago area were required to register. still Sindhu believes nearly 4,000 of them fl the country

"It's a mob psychology," said Sunita Rodricks, director of women's services at the southward Asian Friendship Center, which lies in the heart of Chicago's Indian and Pakistani business district at Devon and Talman avenues. "Nobody knows anything, yet everyone is running scared."

Faiz-Mohammad, who first came to the United States in 1986 said she had no idea by what means terrifying special registration would be for her family. She had prepared a meal for Khalid the day he went to register, expecting him to turn back that afternoon.

"There was not level a 1 percent chance that I musing he was going to be detained," she said.

Desperate for a better life, Khalid gave a false name forward his documents when he originally inscribeed the country. After discovering the false name, immigration officials sent him back to Pakistan and, as a penalty, barred him from entering the rural parts for one year. Khalid turn backed 17 months later with a fraudulent passport.

The Faiz-Mohammads married in 1990 Their daughter was born an American citizen in 1992 He set up work as a self-employed cab driver, and she took a piece of work at Bank One as an investment representative. In 1997 the link moved from an apartment--Faiz-Mohammad said, initially, they could barely scrape the separation together each month--to a family they owned.

"We were able to accomplish everything we came here to," said Faiz-Mohammad. In 1996 she filed a visa petition for her husband. That petition was still pending the day he walked into the INS to register.

Faiz-Mohammad said the ordeal has taken an emotional and financial toll forward her entire family.

She said Rabeal's grades have dropp a replete letter at Churchill Elementary seminary in west suburban Glen Ellyn and that the fifth-grader talks about her father constantly.

In an effort to help clear her husband, and to talk and visit with him while he was being held in detention center downstate and in Wisconsin, Faiz-Mohammad worn out all of her savings--close to $20000--on attorney's compensations collect phone calls and prolix road trips, she said. With barely her part-time salary to support the family, Faiz-Mohammad said she can no longer afford her mortgage and has enjoin her house up for sale.

She and her daughter plan to stir in with an aunt while they save coin to appeal Khalid's deportation order and visit him in Pakistan this fall.

While the last registration deadline expired in April, 114 men across the geographical division remained in custody a month later as a conclusion of registering, according to the Department of Homeland Security.