The US Justice Department's roundup of hundreds of illegal immigrants after the Sept. 11 attacks was plagued with "significant problems" that forced many people with no connection to terrorism to languish in prison in unduly harsh conditions, according to an internal report released on Monday.
The long-awaited report from the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that officials with the FBI, particularly in New York City, "made little attempt to distinguish" between illegal residents who had possible ties to terrorism and those swept up "coincidentally" in the investigation.
The report represented a high-level validation of the concerns voiced by civil rights groups about the broad net authorities have cast in prosecuting the campaign against terrorism, but Justice Department officials said they believed they have acted within the confines of the law.
"We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," said Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department.
More than 760 illegal immigrants in all were imprisoned in the weeks and months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as authorities traced thousands of leads and sought to prevent a feared follow-up attack. Most of those people have now been deported, and none have been charged as terrorists.
The Justice Department has fought to maintain the secrecy of the roundup operation, and Monday's report by the inspector general offers the most detailed portrait to date of who was imprisoned, the delays many faced in being charged or getting a lawyer, and the abuse that some prisoners faced while in prison.
The report showed, for instance, that some 75 percent of the illegal immigrants were from New York or New Jersey, many were Pakistanis, and most were arrested within three months of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The report found that immigrants arrested in the New York City and housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn faced "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" from some guards and "unduly harsh" detention policies.
Eight-four inmates there held in terrorism investigations were subjected to 23-hour "lockdown," the report found.
Immigration officials sometimes did not notify prisoners of the formal charges against them for more than a month, a break from their stated goal of 72 hours, the report said.
The delays hindered the prisoners' ability to understand why they were being held, get lawyers and request a bond hearing, the report said.
In addition, investigators found that the FBI moved slowly to determine whether a suspect rounded up as part of the Sept. 11 investigation was in fact linked to terrorism. While very few suspects have been linked to terrorist suspicions, it took the FBI an average of 80 days to clear prisoners for removal or release because of understaffing and the process was "not given sufficient priority," the report said.
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