**december, ** the two “enemy combatants” you mention are far from being the only people detained by INS, without right to counsel or even any information available to the public on how many people have been detained. Estimates range from 1,000-1,5000 people detained during INS’ initial roundup of Middle Eastern men, which was publicly depicted as a simple information-gathering exercise, not an attempt to round up Middle Eastern men and detain them for immigration or any other violations. Most have since been released, but an unknown number are still in custody, and so far the government has maintained that the public has no right to know the circumstances of their detention, or whether charges have been filed, or ever will be filed, against them. See this thread for more details:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=151537&highlight=immigration
Ann unknown additional number (several hundred in Los Angeles alone) have also been detained since the inception of the new “special registration” program, including two of my firm’s clients. Enforcement of special registration as been extremely problematic, with INS changing many details of its implementation midstream, and with INS officers at many local offices being unaware even of which nationalities are subject to which deadlines and procedures, among other things (such as whether someone born in a country subject to special registration, but who has since become a citizen of another country, is required to register. Your cousin, being originally Pakistani, should check this out very carefully; INS’ Web site has more details.)
So basically, INS has been making up all sorts of new and expansive rules, and enforcing them inconsistently; some people who are clearly subject to the registration requirement, if one has the reading comprehension ability to understand the rules, have been turned away by INS and told they aren’t required to register. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of those people were later held liable and/or paced in deportation proceedings for their failure to register. Numerous others have been held in detention and/or been placed in deportation proceedings in spite of the fact that they have applications pending with INS, which have remained unadjudicated for long periods of time, but which, if adjudicated, would place them back in legal status. The rules apply, with the exception of North Korea, only to citizens of countries with predominantly Arab and/or Muslim poplulations, as there is no practical way to determine a person’s religion or ethnicity by looking at his passport; in practical terms, however, this amounts to racial discrimination. (Sorry, but I can’t cite specific instances, as they are provided to personnel within my firm by the American Immigration Lawyers Association and other immigrant advocacy organization which has been collecting data on Special Registration with great enthusiasm; this data, however, is confidential.)
In sum, your cousin’s situation may not be a civil liberties issue, but there are certainly lots of other immigration issues banging around the U.S. at the moment which have HUGE civil liberties implications. I, for one, as an American and as a Jew, have no problem with the comparison to Nazis. I also suspect that one of my former co-workers, the Immigration Judge of Japanese descent whose grandmother was put in a detention camp and later received compensation for her losses, would also find it an apt, if somewhat exaggerated comparison.