'The stigma and harm of watchlisting placement lasts a lifetime, even if Defendants eventually decide that an individual does not meet the vague, all-inclusive standard for placement and choose to remove an individual from the watchlist,” it says. The suit further maintains that even after an individual is removed from the list, they suffer a lifetime of deleterious ripple effects. It alleges that the plaintiffs have suffered harms, including public humiliation, surveillance, harassment during travel, job denial, and being “effectively exiled from the United States,” and says the list itself is a “de facto Muslim registry” with over 98% of the publicly identified individuals on it being Muslim. “That placement designates them as worthy of permanent suspicion and imposes sweeping consequences that alter nearly every aspect of Plaintiffs’ lives,” the lawsuit says. The suit says that by placing the individuals on the Terrorist Screening Dataset, which is also known as the “no-fly list,” the federal government has “sentenced” the plaintiffs “to lifetime second-class citizenship.” “We need a smarter system in terms of protecting American soil, rather than a system based on profiling that mostly targets Arabs and Muslims,” he said. Khairullah maintains that while the group is seeking an end to the “current dysfunctional list,” they do not want to halt all security screening efforts.

Khairullah is joined by 11 other Muslim Americans who have never been charged with, much less convicted of, terrorism-related offenses, and have chosen to sue the Biden administration in a district court in Massachusetts in a bid to end the watchlist’s use. There should be no profiling based on ethnicity, religion, national background. “For us as Muslims and Arabs, we deserve to be first-class citizens just like everybody else, or citizens in general, because there should be no classes. And second of all, about the treatment that I’ve received, whether it’s at airports, border crossings, or the disinvitation to the White House, and it has fallen on deaf ears,” he told Anadolu in a phone interview. “We have sought answers from the federal government as to why, first of all, I’m on the watchlist. Khairullah is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking an end to the secret FBI watchlist that he was placed on in 2019, and which he believes has led to repeated encounters with law enforcement, including the White House disinvitation. The Biden administration’s response? Silence. He has since been joined by prominent New Jersey politicians, including Senators Cory Booker and Bob Menendez and Representative Bill Pascrell in demanding answers. Khairullah, the longtime mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, had been invited to the event, and was on his way to the US capital when he received a call telling him that he would no longer be allowed to enter the executive mansion. When Mohamed Khairullah was abruptly turned away from a White House Eid al-Fitr celebration four months ago, he demanded answers.

Fbi press conference