Category: Uncategorized

by John Wheat Gibson

The Albanian who publicly announced the names of the assassins who killed Albanian Democratic Party leader Azem Hajdari will be deported to Albania, said Carl Rusnok, public relations officer for the Dallas district of the Department of Homeland Security.

The assassins will be waiting for him with sharpened knives, because on 5 September 2007 the Albanian newspaper Korrieri in Tirana, the capital, on its front page announced that Rrustem Neza, whom the headline called a “Witness of Murder of Azem Hajdari,” had been denied asylum in the US and was about to be returned to Albania. Additionally, reports were broadcast by Albanian television stations.

Rrustem Neza fled to the United States, but was prevented by his previous attorney from presenting the facts of his case when he appeared before an immigration judge to ask for asylum. As a result, the immigration judge denied his asylum application and he now is in immigration custody under a final order of deportation. His two brothers Xhemal and Ismet, who subsequently presented their cases to an immigration judge, both were granted asylum.

BICE deportation officer Kevin Czechowicz took Rrustem Neza to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport to deport him to Albania, but he pleaded for his life so loudly that airline officials would not let him board the plane. Czechowicz said that he will take Mr. Neza to the airport again, and will deport him. At present, Mr. Neza is detained by the DHS at the contract prison in Haskell, Texas.

To date, Mr. Neza never has been allowed to present the facts of his case to an immigration judge. The Board of Immigration Appeals denied his motion to reopen on account of his previous attorney’s ineffectiveness. The BIA did not doubt that Mr. Neza will be killed for his political affiliation when he is deported to Albania. Instead, the BIA said it would not reopen his case because more than 180 days had passed since its first decision.

A petition for review is pending in the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, but DHS could deport Mr. Neza before the 11th Circuit makes a decision. Another problem is that in the 11th Circuit Mr. Neza must prove by clear and convincing evidence that he would win his asylum case if it is reopened. But the Court of Appeals cannot receive any evidence except what the previous attorney submitted to the immigration judge. Yet, it was the previous attorney’s failure to submit the abundant evidence that the Court of Appeals now will not look at which prevented Mr. Neza from receiving a fair hearing and being granted asylum in the first place!

Desperately trying to save his brother’s life, Xhemal Neza has been talking to everyone who will listen about the danger to Rrustem. It was Rrustem’s brother Xhemal who told him the names of the killers, after Xhemal personally witnessed the machine-gunning of Hajdari and his bodyguards. At least one of the assassins was a police officer. Rrustem told the names of the killers to a crowd at a meeting in the Albanian city of Tropoje while Xhemal was unconscious in a hospital in the capital city Tirana, after Xhemal was injured by police fire during a demonstration protesting the assassination.

The assassins were associated with both the ruling Socialist Party and Hajdari’s rival for Democratic Party leadership Sali Berisha. Xhemal and Rrustem hid from the police with two of their cousins, both of whom were murdered before they could flee from Albania.

At the hearing on Rrustem’s asylum application in Miami, the immigration judge doubted that the cousins had been murdered. The official death certificates of both cousins and a newspaper account of the murder of one of them were available to prove the truth, but Rrustem’s attorney was unaware of them and did not show them to the immigration judge.

All pleadings, affidavits, and other evidence are available for inspection and copying at the office of Rrustem’s present attorney John Wheat Gibson. They include a detailed, sworn, account of the murder of Hajdari, and the course of Rrustem’s asylum application in the immigration court.

Attorney John Wheat Gibson’s telephone number is (214)748-6944. Xhemal Neza may be reached at (936)676-8460.

The brother of a jailed Palestinian man whose children and pregnant wife are being held in a Texas jail says he will stage a small protest with his 3-year-old niece Friday morning outside the San Antonio offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at 8940 Fourwinds Dr.

[Editor’s Note: date and time changes have been made to the story below–gm]

Note: there are several resources archived at this site regarding the plight of three Texas families of Palestinian heritage who were abducted and imprisoned in early November. This morning we received the latest information from an attorney for two of the families, the Suleimans and Ibrahims.–gm

email from John Wheat Gibson (Jan. 13, 2007)

Mr. Suleiman told me he cannot stand any more and wants right away to be deported to Jordan. He has been in solitary confinement since December 20,
(yesterday, when I finally found him and telephoned him, he said was the first time in 24 days he was allowed out of his 8×5 foot cell) apparently to
punish him for telling me on the telephone about conditions in the Garvin County, Oklahoma Jail. [Mr. Suleiman was moved to the Oklahoma County, Oklahoma Jail, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and that is where attorney Gibson found him.]

Ayman, the son, having grown up in Texas, being
a high school senior, does not want to go. Apparently the BICE [Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement] now has the travel documents from Jordan it needed to deport the Suleimans, and is making airline arrangements. Because Mr. Suleiman asked me not to, I have not pressed the BIA [Board of Immigration Appeals] to grant the motion to stay deportation that I filed for him last year. The BIA will dismiss it as moot after the deportation.

The Ibrahims almost surely will not be deported. They cannot be deported to Jordan because Jordan refuses to cooperate with the BICE. They cannot legally be deported through Israel, although in the past Israel has assisted the BICE illegally to deport people to the Occupied Territories.
Considering how hard Israel has been trying in the past couple of years to finish the ethnic cleansing of the Palesinians in the Occupied Territories, I do not see why Tel Aviv would help BICE send the Ibrahims back to Palestine, unless they just want to make sure they can kill them.

In any event, there remains not even a pretense of legality in the continuing incarceration of the Ibrahims. The BICE officers will review their detention after 90 days (I calculate February 1) but, because they work
for the sadistic racist Chertoff, will almost surely refuse to release them.

After 180 days, they must be released pursuant to the US Supreme Court decision in the Zadvydas case, but since the monarchists have packed the courts, there is a chance the BICE (executive branch) will fight to
keep them in jail anyway. Still, I intend to file the Zadvydas habeas corpus petition after 180 days, since it is a straightforward legal argument based on established law, and I can base the pleadings on pleadings that I have filed previously with good results….

A more serious challenge to the detention of children
generally, however, must be filed by somebody like the ACLU, who has the resources to do it right and see it through to the end. At this juncture, it is more than I can manage, since if I undertook it I would find myself
practicing law out of a shopping cart under a bridge.

I do appreciate your disseminating my letter to [Austin American-Statesman Reporter Juan] Castillo. I think it aroused the interest of many folks, and it appears the bureaucrats are receiving lots of e-mails, letters, and phone calls as a result. There is a lot of media interest, including San Antonio Express, Houston
Chronicle, and nationally In These Times and New American Media. Of course, the San Antonio Express and Houston Chronicle reporters assume these children
must be terrorists, since the king can do no wrong.

John Wheat Gibson, P.C.