Why the US Supreme Court should allow Muslim man on No Fly List to sue FBI

This week, on behalf of an innocent American Muslim unjustly targeted by our government’s secret list of Muslims, I will argue Yonas Fikre’s case at the US Supreme Court. The case is about the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)'s decision to put our peaceful, law-abiding client on a list—the No Fly List—that has for years prevented him from flying home to the United States from abroad after what was supposed to be a short business trip.

Years after the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed a lawsuit, the government removed Fikre from the list without explanation and has repeatedly asked the courts to end the case.

We’re fighting to continue the case because the legal issues are so important—for the rights of our client, yes, but also for all of our rights everywhere.

The No Fly List is a secret list that the US government makes and distributes to prevent the people listed from boarding a flight that travels through US airspace. There are hundreds of thousands of names on this No Fly List and, based on our close study of a leaked copy of the list, we estimate that about 98 percent of the listed names are Muslim names.

For example, the name Muhammad appears more than a half million times. This is overwhelming evidence that the list is aimed at Muslims only.

The No Fly List sounds ominous, but in reality, the government arrests people, as opposed to merely “listing" them, when it has meaningful evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

That’s just how government officials behave, and so the No Fly List - surprisingly - isn’t actually a list of dangerous people. It’s something else.

We believe the US government often uses the No Fly List to build and expand its network of informants in the Muslim community. That’s exactly the kind of sinister proposition the FBI made to our client here: spy on the Muslim community or we’ll keep you on the No Fly List.

This issue is not new, not even to the Supreme Court. In fact, when the Supreme Court last dealt with the No Fly List in 2020, the case was also about an innocent American Muslim who was given the same ultimatum. There, the Supreme Court ruled against the government, and the same outcome is possible here.

It’s been more than 20 years since the government adopted a system of secret lists to regulate who and how even innocent citizens can travel. With great success, the United States has proselytised internationally on the virtues of keeping secret lists in an effort to make it a global enterprise.

The No Fly List has never been bigger or more pervasive. And yet, there’s not a single success in 20 years of secret lists. No plot has been discovered or disrupted because of the No Fly List. There’s no perpetrator who has been apprehended. And every violent catastrophe in the United States not prevented by the No Fly List is more evidence of the list’s failures.

What we have instead is a secret list of Muslims, hundreds of thousands of names long, that the FBI has illegally curated for more than 20 years.

On Monday, the government will ask the Supreme Court to shield this list from any court’s scrutiny - a good strategy because it is obviously objectionable to any fair-minded observer what they’ve done.

But if the Supreme Court doesn’t do what the government asks and allows our client’s case to continue, we’ll be able to explain just how shocking the government’s No Fly List is and the substantial threat it poses to Muslims and others alike.