WASHINGTON: Mohamed Khairullah, the longest serving Muslim mayor in the U.S., thought he had finally resolved years of airport searches and border interrogations in 2021, when his name appeared to be removed from the government’s secret terror watchlist.
Then, earlier this year, the discriminatory treatment renewed when Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, found himself uninvited from a White House celebration of the Eid al-Fatr holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, without explanation.
A lawsuit filed Monday by an Islamic civil rights group on behalf of Khairullah and other plaintiffs says his exclusion from the White House event demonstrates that Muslims face negative repercussions even after they are able to clear their name from the list.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, is a broad challenge to the watchlist’s constitutionality, and one of several that the Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed over the watchlist’s 20 years of existence. CAIR’s lawsuits contend that in nearly every instance, the government places names on the list without valid reason, and that Muslims who are on the list face scrutiny only because of anti-Muslim discrimination.
The watchlist has only continued to grow. And much of what is known about the list has come from answers CAIR has received from the government as it defends its practices.
