American Family Sues U.S. for Abusive Detention at Canadian Border

MINNEAPOLIS — The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Minnesota, and the law firm Robins Kaplan filed a lawsuit today on behalf of a family of U.S. citizens — including four children — who were detained for over 10 hours at the U.S.-Canada border while coming home from a trip to visit relatives.

During the harrowing experience, border officers surrounded the family with guns drawn. Later on, during the long detention, the father, Abdisalam Wilwal, passed out and required medical attention. Wilwal and his family were detained because he is on the government’s terrorism watchlist, but he does not know why and says there is no good reason.

The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the government violated the family’s constitutional rights, as well as an injunction to prevent their rights from being violated again. The lawsuit also challenges the lack of a meaningful process for Wilwal to contest his placement on the watchlist.

“The border is not a rights-free zone, and what this family went through was clearly unconstitutional,” said ACLU attorney Hugh Handeyside. “The government needs to put policies in place to ensure that the kind of abuse the Wilwals and their children suffered doesn’t happen again.”

Wilwal and his wife, Sagal Abdigani, live in a Minneapolis suburb with their four children, who were 5, 6, 8, and 14 when they were detained in March 2015. Wilwal and Abdigani are originally from Somalia, which they fled due to the civil war there in the 1990s. They met in the U.S. after each immigrated here in 2000 and eventually became U.S. citizens and married.

On the day of the incident, the family was driving home early in the morning from a trip to see Abdigani’s sister in Saskatchewan. A few minutes after they stopped their minivan at the border station at Portal, North Dakota, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers came out with their guns pointed at the van. Border officers handcuffed Wilwal in front of his family, who were extremely upset and frightened. The children were screaming and crying.

The CBP officers took Wilwal into the border station, with one officer accusing him of being involved with terrorism and asking if he was Muslim. Wilwal replied that he is a Muslim — and also an American citizen. The officers left Wilwal in a room for hours with nothing to eat or drink and with his hands cuffed behind his back. He eventually felt light-headed and passed out on the floor, prompting the officers to call paramedics. The officers then gave him a small glass of water but no food, and they cuffed his hands in the front instead of the back.

Several hours later, two agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrived. Wilwal asked for an attorney and was told that if he wanted to leave, he had to answer their questions. The agents questioned Wilwal for about 45 minutes about various topics, including his religious practices, travel, family, and job. They finally set him free with no explanation, nearly 11 hours after first detaining him.

Meanwhile, Abdigani and the four children were detained elsewhere in the border station. She asked if she could take the children home and come back for her husband later, or if a friend or relative on either side of the border could come to get the children. The officers refused, saying, “You’re all the same. You’re all detainees, including the children.”

Throughout the ordeal, the children were extremely upset. As it dragged on, at one point the 8-year-old girl said to her mother, “Maybe they’ll kill us after sunset.”

Abdigani’s phone had been confiscated, but her 14-year-old son realized that he still had his phone because he hadn’t been asked to hand it over. He gave it to his mother, who called 911 and told the dispatcher that she and her family were being held against their will at the border station and feared for their safety. A CBP officer grabbed the phone and talked to the dispatcher, and the police never came.

Two CBP officers then took the 14-year-old into another room where they patted him down. They then told him to remove his clothes for a strip search, which he refused to do. A DHS document obtained by the ACLU that summarizes the incident shows that the agents also searched the contents of the boy’s phone. It also shows that the father, Wilwal, was detained because of a “record hit,” indicating that he was on a watchlist.

“My kids still have nightmares about this awful experience,” Abdigani said. “We were all so scared, I was honestly worried that we would all be killed. We can’t go visit my family in Canada because we’re afraid something like this will happen again.”

As soon as they got back to Minneapolis, Wilwal and Abdigani went to their local FBI and DHS offices to report what had happened. They were later told that it likely occurred because Wilwal was on a government terrorism watchlist. They both filled out a DHS form that the government provides for people who think they are wrongly on the watchlist, but they never heard back.

“I came to this country seeking safety and freedom, and I’m proud to be an American,” said Wilwal. “But our own government just shouldn’t be treating my family and me or anyone else this way. It’s wrong.”

According to leaked documents, the government uses vague criteria and a very low threshold to place people on the terrorism watchlist. The government’s watchlisting rules state that “Concrete facts are not necessary” to meet the standard and that uncorroborated information of questionable or even doubtful reliability can suffice. As of June 2016, the watchlist included about 1 million people.

“The watchlisting system is a due process disaster,” said Handeyside. “It is wrong and unfair for the government to place people on a secret blacklist and then harass them on that basis, all without giving them any meaningful way to clear their names and get off the list. The system results in major violations of people’s rights.”

Today’s complaint is here:
https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/wilwal-v-kelly-complaint

More on government watchlists is here:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/governments-own-rules-show-why-watchlists-make-bad-policy

A blog post by one of the plaintiffs, Sagal Abdigani, is here:
https://www.aclu.org/sagal-blog