The U.S. government has dropped its cases against two 16-year-old “would-be suicide bombers,” whose plight has been remarkably championed by Edkra and others.
Key: The girl from Guinea has returned to high school. The Bangladeshi girl remains in custody and faces deportation along with her parents.
Reports Democracy Now! and just a couple other news sources:
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DN! continues:
The case was cloaked in secrecy. Hearings were closed to the public. FBI comments were sealed. And attorneys were barred from disclosing government information.
But it now appears the government had no case at all and that the girls posed no threat.
The New York Times reports the government released the girl from Guinea and she returned to school on Friday.
Meanwhile the Bangladeshi girl remains in detention – but for immigration reasons, not national security. An immigration judge has ordered her and her parents to be deported.
The site created to publicize the plight of the two teens does not record, best I can tell, the release of the Guinean teen. And I cannot find a single diary that records the release of Adama Bah, which was reported in The New York Times on May 7:
It began with two 16-year-old immigrant girls arrested at dawn, detained far from home, and, in a chilling government assertion, called would-be suicide bombers who posed “an imminent threat to the security of the United States.”
But now, after holding the girls for six weeks in a Pennsylvania detention center, the government has quietly released one of the girls and is allowing the other to leave the country with her family.
One girl, an immigrant from Guinea, was back in her East Harlem high school yesterday among the jubilant friends and teachers who have insisted all along that the accusation was absurd. The other girl, who grew up in Queens, was still in detention, but was granted an order from an immigration judge that will allow her and her parents to return to their native Bangladesh as soon as the trip can be arranged.
Many questions remain unanswered in a case that has been marked from the start by secrecy, including closed hearings, sealed F.B.I. declarations, and orders barring the lawyers from disclosing government information. James Margolin, an F.B.I. spokesman, did not return calls seeking comment on the latest developments, and earlier had said he could not discuss the cases.
But Natasha Pierre, the lawyer for the Guinean girl, Adama Bah, said the outcome spoke for itself. “She should never have been detained in the first place,” Ms. Pierre said of her client, who was not yet 2 when she arrived in New York with her parents, Muslims who have a trinket shop near a subway stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “I’m still under a gag order and I have to be very careful not to cross the line. All I can say is she’s innocent – she’s more than innocent. The girl doesn’t know anything.”
The teenager’s release came with conditions that Ms. Pierre said she was restrained from discussing. But the lawyer indicated that the conditions included Adama’s being available to government investigators and reporting to immigration authorities. Her father, Mamadou Bah, a former cabdriver, is in a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., facing deportation for immigration violations.
The reaction of fellow students and teachers was emotional:
Her return was a joyful celebration. “She’s seeing everybody, and she’s smiling because people are jumping up and down and ecstatic,” Ms. Siegel said in a cellphone call from school. “She’s like a little bird that just got out of a cage.”
Fellow students began laughing and crying at the same time when they saw her walk in, said a friend, Yolanda Lawrence, 15. Many had tried to send Adama letters of support, but were told that she was not allowed to receive or send mail in the maximum security juvenile detention center, in Berks County, Pa., and was allowed one five-minute phone call from her mother each week.
“The gag order imposed by an immigration judge at the government’s insistence,” reports the NYT, “seemed to be weighing on Adama when she emerged briefly from Heritage High School between classes.” She told classmates and teachers that she couldn’t talk about the case.
“I’m happy to see my friends, and especially my family,” she said. When federal agents released her to her mother, in the family’s apartment in East Harlem, “my mother couldn’t stop smiling.”
Her detention experience remains vivid, though.
“I cried a lot,” she said. ” You just feel depressed, you just feel like nothing when you’re in there.”
Asked if she understood why she had been detained, the girl replied, “Honestly, no.” She added, speaking of federal agents, “They asked a lot of questions.”
Ms. Pierre said she herself was at a loss to explain how Adama was swept into the investigation. She and the Bangladeshi girl, seized separately on March 24, were not even friends.
I hope the site that campaigned for the girls’ release updates its news prominently. And great thanks to Edkra — and many others here — who worked so hard to help these girls.
I doubt much can be done to prevent the deportation of the other girl and her parents. You can read all the details of the deportation issue at the New York Times.