America's longest-serving Muslim mayor reveals impact of FBI watchlist

On May 1 this year, prominent Muslims in the United States were supposed to gather at the White House to meet President Joe Biden and celebrate the festival of Eid al Fitr, which marks the completion of the holy month of Ramadan.

Among the invited guests was Mohammed Khairullah, a burly man with a shaved head who is the mayor of the Prospect Park borough in the state of New Jersey.

But half an hour before he was scheduled to arrive at the White House, he received a phone call telling him he was no longer invited: the Secret Service had refused to allow him in.

Khairullah says after this phone call, he contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) regarding the incident; they confirmed that he had been barred from entering the White House because of a secret status the FBI had assigned to him years earlier without notice or explanation.

“I don't know how I got on that list," he tells TRT World. "But the majority of the people on that list are either Muslims or Arabs, which tells you that I can easily get on this list basically by sneezing the wrong way.”

A recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) highlights the disproportionate number of Muslims in the FBI’s Terrorism Screening Database and on its No-Fly List.

The report reveals that more than 98 percent of the individuals on the FBI’s watchlist are Muslim, with Muslims comprising a whooping 99 percent of the Bureau’s No-Fly List, which contains the names of those who can be stopped from boarding a commercial airliner.

Khairullah, who had sought refuge in the US after escaping violence in Syria in the 1990s, never imagined he would end up on the list.

In an interview with TRT World, he discusses how being on the list impacts his political career, personal life and the wider Muslim community.

A political career sparked by a passion for firefighting

Khairullah reminisces about his childhood dreams of becoming a firefighter and how his political career in the United States began.

“What I wanted to do, always, as a child, was to be a firefighter. The United States gave me the opportunity to become a volunteer firefighter, and that was my first experience dealing with the political system," he recalls.

Since becoming a firefighter required US citizenship, Khairullah was told that local rules could be changed on a town level to allow him to join the fire department.

“You could make rules locally — and that made me intrigued by local politics,” he says.

Khairullah became a member of the City Council after obtaining his citizenship in 2000. In 2005, he received support from his colleagues on the Council to fill the seat of the previous mayor, who had moved out of town. Since then, Khairullah has run for five terms, each term lasting four years.

"I think we could change the narrative by being involved within the system. They no longer can say, ‘any Mohammed is whatever we see on TV, because the Mohammed in Prospect Park, NJ, is the person we know that helps people and raises funds for areas hit by disaster’," he says.

"They know us (Muslims) for who we are, not for what the media tells them."

The urgent need to reform the FBI watchlist

Mayor Khairullah emphasises that reforming the process of compiling the watchlist should be a top priority in the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. "It's crucial for Muslim organisations and the Muslim community to address this as a serious and major topic," he states.

"How you get on it (the FBI list), we don't know. Until it was leaked, the government did not acknowledge that it exists. I think, until now, they kind of don't acknowledge its existence," says Khairullah.

"That's the crazy part in the United States, a country of institutions and a constitution that protects civil liberties. I am guilty of something in their eyes, which prevents me from being a normal citizen, but they won't tell me what it is, which is, in my mind, the core issue of what is wrong with that list."

According to Khairullah, federal agents provide no explanations regarding the watchlist to elected officials, congresspeople or senators. This lack of transparency further exacerbates the situation for Muslim citizens listed by the FBI.

“They won’t even answer to federally elected officials. They won’t answer to senators. They won’t answer to congressmen… I mean, these are people who sit in Congress, in the Senate and they vote on major bills that fall on US policy, but they still can’t get an answer. So what do you think of this humble servant or any other average citizen?”

Khairullah is calling for urgent reform in both the creation and maintenance of the watchlist. He stresses the need for a transparent process to allow individuals to defend themselves against whatever allegedly incriminating ‘evidence’ had them included on the list in order to be removed from it altogether.

Impact on Muslims' lives

The repercussions of being on the watchlist extend beyond Mayor Khairullah's political career. He recounts a personal experience at the Canadian border, where he was detained in a glass room for three to four hours. "My toddler daughter was asking me why I can't get to her," he recalls.

"That is not an experience that I want my children or the children of others to go through because that will give the impression that you are a second- or third-class citizen."

While Mayor Khairullah’s inclusion on the FBI watchlist is a high-profile case, he highlights that there are hundreds of thousands of people suffering silently.

“A flight between the New York area and Chicago could be less than two hours by plane, but then some people choose to take a 16-hour car ride if they need to go there” — because many would rather avoid harassment at the airport.

The CAIR report sheds light on the severe impact the watchlist has on the lives of Muslims. Saadiq Long, a US Air Force veteran with no criminal record, is just one of many Muslims who has faced significant challenges due to his watchlist status. Flight bans prevented him from visiting his critically ill mother in Oklahoma, forcing him to undertake arduous overland journeys. Stories like Long’s are a dime a dozen among Muslims in the US.

Avoiding airports and travelling by car doesn’t always shield individuals from the far-reaching consequences of being on the watchlist. They often find themselves confronted by a swarm of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) officers at frontiers, where they face a series of distressing ordeals. They are often held at gunpoint, handcuffed and subjected to hours of relentless interrogation. In some cases, they may even be detained under hazardous conditions.

Anas Elhady is another Muslim whose case is highlighted in CAIR’s report. Elhady, a college student, was returning home to Michigan after a visit to Canada in 2015. Upon crossing the border, he was detained by CBP officers who proceeded to subject him to an extensive interrogation that lasted for hours. Throughout this ordeal, Elhady was confined to a freezing-cold cement cell wearing only his shirt, pants and thin socks. Despite his repeated pleas for additional clothing or a blanket, his requests were denied by the CBP officers until he lost consciousness from the cold. It was only then that he was finally taken to a hospital.

These stories reveal the profound human toll exacted by the watchlist system, leaving affected individuals with lasting scars and eroding their sense of safety and dignity.

Forced to become informants

One of the FBI’s tactics while monitoring those on the watchlist is to coerce them into becoming informants within their communities. Mayor Khairullah, himself, was subjected to this approach.

“I have been interviewed by federal agents and they asked me to sort of become an informant,” he reveals. The agents, knowing he had taken several trips to Syria, requested that he go on social media and find some information about the Muslim community in the Middle Eastern country.

He refused the offer, telling the agents, “There's nothing that I could share with you. If there's anything that I need to share with you that I know is important for our country, I would, I'll be more than happy to do so. But I'm not going to go on social media and dig up stuff,” continuing, “That's his job, not my job.”

The FBI’s coercion tactics extend beyond high-profile civil servants to encompass young Muslim citizens in the US. The CAIR report provides several examples illustrating how these methods have been used on young American Muslims, with the case of Osama Ahmed being just one of many.

In early 2011, Osama Ahmed, an 18-year-old US citizen, experienced a harrowing encounter upon his return to the US from Yemen. Right after disembarking from his flight, Ahmed was taken to an interrogation room where he was kept for some 7 hours of questioning by FBI agents before he was released. Days later, FBI agents visited Ahmed’s home and forced him to be an informant in Yemen. They even offered to teach him how to skydive. One of the agents informed Ahmed that he was on the No-Fly List, but if he cooperated, his name would be removed.

These two examples highlight a concerning pattern of targeting individuals within the Muslim community in the US, regardless of their age, political status or criminal background.

Is there any white person on the list?

Despite federal law enforcement officials consistently identifying white supremacists as the primary threats to national security, the focus of the FBI watchlist disproportionately targets Muslims based on race and religion, as stated in the CAIR report. However, the question of whether white individuals end up on this list remains unanswered.

Khairullah remarks, “Does that happen to a John Doe who happens to be a white person? I mean, for God’s sake, on January 6th of 2020, they almost toppled our democracy by trying to storm the Capitol building,” he asserts, referring to the deeply ingrained racism found within and throughout the US political system.

Who will be the next target of the FBI?

Both Mayor Khairullah and the CAIR report warn that the individuals on the FBI’s watchlist face serious challenges and repercussions. For the past two decades, the Bureau’s secret list has brought hardship and fear to the Muslim community.

However, the report cautions that, "The FBI's next million targets won't be Muslims. With the ‘War on Terror’ fog lifting, the FBI’s secret list will one day find a new target. The next target will be our fellow Americans."

Khairullah urges the US Muslim community to be proactive and engage in local events and activities.

“I urge everybody to volunteer in their local community, because that changes the narrative that people see of Muslims. So we all need to be involved, we all need to do our part in changing the narratives and then this way, we gain more support when we speak about issues of racism and discrimination.”