The cases that involve unfair
levels of scrutiny during the immigration process are particularly emotional for us because they often result in prolonged suffering for families and communities, especially when they keep loved ones apart.
These sorts of cases cover issues such as people being placed on the "no fly list," the use of special codes on airline boarding passes that trigger burdensome searches and detentions, or at their very worst, bureaucratic abuses that leave individuals in limbo for months, or sometimes years, as they wait to be granted visas or citizenship.
In one such case, it took over 20 years of
legal struggle, involving multiple lawyers, before one man was finally allowed to take his oath of allegiance and become a US citizen.
The man in question, Imam Sait Zekiri, was no stranger to difficulty and upheaval in his life: he’d grown up in Macedonia during a time of great political unrest, a situation that ultimately resulted in his homeland ceasing to exist. After years of difficulty, he didn’t anticipate that his greatest struggle might be against a legal system that had no reason not to grant him citizenship, especially because his wife was herself already a US citizen.
He
fought the system alone for over a decade before turning to the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America (CLCMA), who helped him counter the many arbitrary obstructions that were drummed up by immigration services.
