Assisting Terrorism’s Other Victims

New foundation support is helping to bolster charities that serve Arab and Muslim immigrants

One morning last November, Noor Ahmed’s violence-scarred life was sent into another tailspin. A telephone

cable installer, Mr. Ahmed, 38, was awakened at his apartment near Seattle’s airport by three federal immigration officers, then handcuffed and jailed.

He was told he would soon be put on a plane bound for Somalia, the country of his birth, where his wife had been killed by a stray shot fired during the country’s civil war, and where, before he fled in 1996, his life had been threatened by both warlords and roving bands of teenagers.

Like many of the estimated 25,000 Somalis in the Seattle area, Mr. Ahmed knew that two Somalis deported from the United States earlier in the year had been killed upon their return. One of the victims was from Seattle.

“You aren’t safe anywhere there,” says Mr. Ahmed. “If they hear you’ve come from somewhere else, they think you’ll have money, and they’ll kill you for it.”

One of his fellow detainees had heard of the Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington.The Seattle organization was formed the week after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to help immigrants who had been targets of violence by angry citizens and increased scrutiny by the federal government.

The Hate Free Zone Campaign found lawyers for Mr. Ahmed and four other jailed Somali men. The lawyers, who donated their time, persuaded a federal court to rule that the government had violated the law by rounding up men to send back to Somalia, which has no recognized government. The court allowed the men to seek asylum in the United States and effectively ended the prospect of deportations for 2,700 other Somalis around the country.

“I feel like they gave me my life back,” says Mr. Ahmed.

Charities Besieged

Charities that have taken on the causes of those who, like Mr. Ahmed, have been affected by the fallout from the terrorist attacks say their workload has grown significantly in the past two years. Not only has the federal government crackdown on men from Arab or predominantly Muslim countries (such as Somalia) who are in the United States caused demand for aid to soar. A surge in violence and discrimination against immigrants from those countries has also prompted an expansion of services by groups that serve the 3 million Arab immigrants in the United States.

Despite the crush of clients, the dozen or more groups that have aided the immigrants since September 11 say they are now in a better position to help, largely because of increased interest from foundations. The situation is a stark contrast to what groups that serve immigrants from the rest of the world face: a shortage of money due to the stalled economy and increased workload as Americans become less welcoming to people who were not born in the United States.

Grant makers such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, both in New York, have sent millions of dollars to groups that provide services to and help defend the legal rights of Arab and Muslim immigrants.

A collaboration of five large foundations formed in response to heightened federal government policies regarding immigrants hopes to begin making grants this fall, many of them to small, local Arab and Muslim organizations. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, all in New York, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in Miami, and perhaps others are expected to provide millions of dollars to help local immigrants groups grow larger, join forces with human-rights organizations, and form coalitions with other ethnic organizations.

The result of foundation largess is stronger and more effective groups, say some observers.

“The ultimate irony of 9/11 is that terrorism was blamed on Arabs and Muslims, yet it is now impossible, or politically incorrect, to antagonize those groups,” says Muzaffar A. Chishti, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington. “They are now seen as groups whose voices must be heard, which certainly wasn’t the case before 9/11. The organizations that speak up for them are responsible for much of that.”

Expanding Services

Although many of the philanthropic players making grants to Arab charities — such as the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the North Star Fund, both in New York, and the Tides Foundation, in San Francisco — are considered to be liberal foundations predisposed to helping immigrants, many Arab organization leaders say they had previously not received foundation grants.

“Before 9/11, we didn’t exist, as far as foundations are concerned,” says Emira Habiby Browne, executive director of the Arab-American Family Support Center, in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Foundation grants designed to deal with the aftermath of September 11 have allowed charities to:

• Expand services. The Arab-American Family Support Center, which was formed in 1993 to provide social services to Arab families who had recently arrived in the United States, found itself unprepared for the waves of clients that flooded the charity in search of legal help and protection from harassment after the terror attacks. The organization’s workload increased further when 4 of its 10 staffers resigned because of threats made against them while they wore veils on their way to work or manned the phones at the center.

  Non-Arab volunteers stepped in to help out, says Ms. Habiby Browne, as did foundations with grants to pay for their training. Because of $800,000 in emergency grants from Rockefeller and other foundations in the past two years, the group has started advocacy campaigns and emergency hotlines, and begun providing legal aid to Arabs and Muslims jailed by the federal government for alleged violations of immigration laws.

  The Arab-American Family Support Center, which had routinely served hundreds of families per year before September 11, helped 3,000 families last year.

• Fight harassment of immigrants. Responding to acts of violence against Arab, Muslim, and Sikh immigrants in Seattle in the days following September 11, Pramila Jayapal began working in behalf of victims of assaults and threats. Nationally, harassment and violence against Arabs, Muslims, and natives of South Asian countries soared after September 11. A Federal Bureau of Investigation report issued in November found that such crimes as assault and making physical threats against Muslims grew from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001.

  With the help of a $75,000 start-up grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, Ms. Jayapal started the Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington, a statewide organization. The group has since garnered other major foundation support, such as a $100,000 grant from the National Conference for Community and Justice, in New York, as it has seen its full-time staff grow from one to seven, and its annual budget swell to $500,000, most of which comes from foundations.

  The organization can now afford to run an emergency phone line for immigrants facing harassment, as well as programs that inform immigrants of their rights. Ms. Jayapal says the charity has linked three Somali grocers with lawyers who successfully won back the store owners’ privileges to handle food stamps after federal officials claimed they had been using the stamps illegally. The grocers say they were the victims of a post-September 11 crackdown on Muslims, and that the government’s accusations were partly the result of cultural differences in how the stores sold meats that conformed to Islamic dietary laws.

  The organization also helped win the release of two immigrant children from Pakistan who had been held in solitary confinement by federal immigration officials.

  Ms. Jayapal adds that foundation support has helped the group achieve one mission it shares with other Arab organizations: to bring members of different ethnic groups together, as well as link them to existing human-rights advocacy groups. Somalis needing legal help have been aided by outside groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, in New York, because of the Hate Free Zone Campaign’s efforts. Immigrants from Arab countries have conducted discussions with Japanese-Americans detained by the federal government during World War II to explore common aspects of their experience.

• Build cultural campaigns. The Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, in Dearborn, Mich., has received more than $3-million in grants since September 11, 2001, to open a neighborhood health center and the Arab-American National Museum, the first of its kind in the United States. In January, the Kresge Foundation, in Troy, Mich., made a $1.5-million challenge grant to the group to help the museum open by next year.

  The charity has also received $1.5-million in support for a program to develop a post-9/11 campaign to hold workshops across the country on Arab-American life and customs. Among the contributors are: the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich.; and the Skillman Foundation and the McGregor Fund, both in Detroit.

  Another program run by the Arab Community Center is geared toward helping small Arab groups become larger. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford, and the Open Society Institute have made nearly $500,000 in total donations to the program.

  Karen Rignall, national outreach director at the center, says that programs that explain Arab and Arab-American culture may help others gain understanding of what she calls “a quiet minority.”

• Help immigrants jailed in post-September 11 government sweeps. Desis Rising Up and Moving, a group that serves South Asian immigrants (who are known collectively as “desis”) in Queens, N.Y., has received money from Ford and others to find lawyers for men jailed following the September 11 attacks and as part of a federal program that required young immigrant men from Arab or Muslim countries to register with immigration authorities in 2002 and early this year.

As many as 150,000 young men across the country reported their whereabouts during the months leading up to the war in Iraq. Up to 13,000 of them may face deportation hearings because of violations of immigration rules. Many have sought the help of Arab groups to fill out forms or find lawyers.

Desis Rising Up and Moving now receives more from foundations than it did before September 11 — grants now account for about one-third of its $250,000 annual budget, as opposed to one-quarter or less of its budget in 2000. Much of the new grant money has been earmarked for legal representation and advocacy for those jailed, and to link their families with social services, such as food help and mental-health services. The charity has worked with 300 families since the jailings began.

Despite the increase in grants, the group can’t keep up with the demands of its clients, says Monami Maulik, the group’s director. She adds that groups such as hers worry that the short-term grants flow will subside.

“We need long-term programs if we are going to continue to do our advocacy and services work,” Ms. Maulik says. “We’re dealing with people who don’t go to mainstream organizations when they have needs. We get people who fall through the cracks.”

Some grant makers say that charities that have received emergency money may have reason to worry. The Rockefeller Foundation has made $6-million in grants to groups to deal with post-September 11 issues, including $750,000 to charities that serve Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. But it probably won’t follow them up with more money.

“Most of our funding for immigrants and refugees goes to groups outside the United States,” says Salvatore LaSpada, an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation and a board member of the Arab-American Family Support Center. “In that sense, these were pretty extraordinary grants.”

Charities Scrutinized

While many organization leaders echo Ms. Maulik’s concerns, they still assert that the post-September 11 grants couldn’t have come at a better time.

Besides the crackdown on immigrants, charities that send money from the United States to Muslim countries have also felt the heat. A few have been shut down or seen their leaders arrested after federal investigators looked into whether their funds have been funneled to terrorist groups abroad.

Leaders of small organizations say the highly publicized cases have created a chilling effect on donations — making foundation support even more necessary for such groups to survive. Giving by Arabs to Arab organizations has especially fallen off, many groups report.

At the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s branch in San Francisco, donations by Arabs have dropped by more than 80 percent since the government began looking more closely at Islamic charities. Before the attacks, the organization received 80 percent of its donations by check. Now, about 80 percent come in the form of cash because donors wish to avoid the eyes of federal investigators, says Linda Y. Sherif, the organization’s legal director, who adds that foundations and other sources haven’t yet picked up the slack.

But while Arab groups say that foundation support is especially necessary to help counteract government antiterrorism policies, other nonprofit groups say that grant makers would better spend their money by backing federal government efforts to more tightly restrict immigration and more closely monitor the activities of immigrants, in light of the September 11 attacks. Such groups support the USA Patriot Act, a law that affords the federal government greater authority to monitor the activities of immigrants and others.

“A broad variety of reforms were needed to gain control of the borders and the interior of the country” after September 11, says Jack Martin, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in Washington, an advocacy group that receives the bulk of its funds from conservative foundations. “The Patriot Act was an important first step.”

Federal officials say new legal powers helped thwart more than 100 terrorist plots at home and abroad and prevented 11 known terrorists from entering the country. But some organizations say the government has gone too far, stripping immigrants of civil liberties through lengthy detentions and by singling out Arabs and Muslims for deportation.

Small Groups Left Behind

The effects of post-September 11 grant making haven’t filtered down to the smallest of groups, which remain in precarious financial shape as donations from individuals fall and state and local contracts are trimmed.

At Care R Us, a social-services organization for Arabs in Anaheim, Calif., two full-time and six part-time employees — nearly the entire staff — were laid off this spring when more than half of the charity’s $250,000 annual budget was slashed because of state budget cutbacks. The employees were rehired after the charity received AmeriCorps volunteers and federal grants earlier this year.

“We’ve tried to get foundation help, but it hasn’t worked,” says Nahla Kayali, director of Care R Us. She adds that many Arab donors have lost jobs and no longer give to the group. “We’re starting from zero dollars again, and many grant makers don’t want to help groups like that.”

Adds Abdulkadir Adam Jama, executive director of Somali Community Services of Seattle, which opened two years ago: “It is almost impossible for small ethnic organizations to get foundation money. It’s hard to compete with mainstream organizations who have been around a lot longer than we have.”

But Arab charities might have to do more than just seek continued support from foundations to survive once their emergency funds run out. Advocacy groups will have to craft campaigns that take into account heightened concerns about security to win more support from foundations and individuals.

“We can say that the government is incorrect in overreacting to the threat of terrorism, but we shouldn’t diminish or minimize the security threat the government is facing,” says Mr. Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute. “Organizations need to do more than have a knee-jerk, the-government-is-wrong kind of reaction.”

Mr. Jama adds that, if the attitudes of the government and public begin to change, groups can turn their energies from fighting harassment and government policies into something less reactive.

“If Muslims are not treated like terrorists, then there is a place for these groups,” Mr. Jama says. “They can move more into civil-education programs that teach immigrants how to live here and citizens what kind of conditions these immigrants are coming from. They could become the lubricant between immigrants and citizens during a time when there is a desperate need for one.”