Muslim couple’s trip to California, Nevada turns into nightmare

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

German national Majed Shehadeh and his wife, Joanne Mulligan, decided that when they visited their daughter in California for the holidays, they would fly through McCarran International Airport.

The Muslim couple wanted to avoid Los Angeles International Airport because two years ago, federal authorities detained them for 4 1/2 hours.

Mulligan arrived from Germany first, on Dec. 17, and the U.S.-born traveler cleared customs swiftly. She went on to her daughter's Bakersfield, Calif., home, then returned to Henderson to visit her aunt, Louise Langlois, before heading to the airport to pick up Shehadeh last Thursday .

The Lufthansa charter aircraft her husband was flying on landed shortly after 2 p.m. But her husband of 30 years wasn't to be found.

She waited and waited. She asked an official with Condor, the charter company. Eventually, the official told her Shehadeh, who is of Syrian descent, had been detained.

She said that as she waited for her husband she flashed on events of two years earlier, when the two had flown over together for daughter Majida Shehadeh's wedding. Now the occasion was her anniversary, and her admission to the California State Bar.

Mulligan tried to calm herself, thinking that Shehadeh, 62, would be with her again after a few hours, by 6 p.m. or so, a little inconvenienced, but none the worse for the wear.

But 6 p.m. came and went. At 8:45, she said, "I was really concerned for his health." Since a 2004 heart attack, he had to take medicine every four hours. It had been nearly 24 hours since he left Germany.

"I thought, 'Did he eat? Did he take his medicine?' "

She approached an official who identified himself as a senior agent with the federal U.S. Customs and Border Protection and asked if she could talk to her husband. Told no, she asked about the medicine and why her husband was detained.

She said the agent told her, "I'm not here to answer your questions about every procedure."

Roxanne Hercules, a spokeswoman for the Customs and Border Protection, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that Shehadeh was denied entry, but would not discuss specifics. She said Shehadeh's visa waiver normally offered to Germans could have been denied because "he could have a criminal record, or it could be a terrorism issue."

Sometime after 9 p.m., the official told Mulligan that her husband was being taken to the North Las Vegas Detention Center.

"In his whole life, he hasn't gotten a parking ticket," Mulligan said. She called the detention center to leave her aunt's phone number, but employees refused to take the message.

Luckily, Shehadeh had memorized his daughter's phone number and through her, was able to obtain Mulligan's aunt's number. Late that night, he called his wife.

"We talked two minutes and the phone went dead," she said. "That was the last time we talked."

Her husband tried to call again, but could not get through.

Mulligan said she grew more concerned about the heart medicine. Days later, she would find out that he went nearly 36 hours before receiving medication, although he was denied his own prescription. His nose bled and his heart had palpitations as he sat in a cell with 25 other men, she said.

Mulligan looked up an immigration attorney and placed dozens of calls, including to the offices of Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley, Nevada Democrats, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

"You don't know me - my husband's in jail," she said. "I don't want to lose him."

The three-day holiday weekend worked against her. She went to the detention center but was told she couldn't visit her husband for eight to 10 days. At that, she broke down and cried. "I was standing a few feet away from him," she said.

About 4 p.m. Sunday, Shehadeh called his daughter to tell her that federal officials were about to put him on a plane back to Germany.

Twenty-four hours later, Mulligan spoke again to her husband, who was indeed back in Germany. She said he was worried about her worrying about him.

Shehadeh told AP in a phone interview from his home in Alzenau, a small Bavarian village, that he had given an official at McCarran his German passport "and he looked to see which countries I visited. He found I had stamps that looked like Arabic and asked if they were fake."

"Nobody ever informed me why I was being questioned," he said. "All that was ever told to me was this had to do with Washington."

An aide to Feinstein later told the family that Shehadeh was on a "look-out list," Mulligan told AP.

Mulligan, born in Massachusetts, retired as a math teacher for the U.S. military. She has lived in Germany since marrying, and the couple has visited the United States many times over the years. In 1996 she founded a nonprofit organization called People in Motion to help people in need, including children in Afghanistan and women in Bosnia.

Her husband's detention "has to do with that we're Muslim, that's all," she said.

Daughter Majida Shehadeh said, "When you're a Muslim, you expect you're going to get this in airports - a little more runaround. But being detained like this - it's unbelievable. It's unacceptable."

Mulligan waited Tuesday for a family reunion of a different sort - on the phone, with her husband and daughter, to decide what to do about "the injustice of it all."

The case has come to the attention of the Council on Islamic-American Relations, a national group.

Affad Shaikh, civil rights coordinator for the Los Angeles chapter, said his group will be filing a formal complaint to the Homeland Security Department.

"We want to know why was he banned? What happened?" Shaikh said.

Peter Ashman, the attorney called by Mulligan, called the case "a little bit scary."

Such detentions, he said, don't even make sense from a national security standpoint.

"If he was a bad guy, why did they let him go? And if he was a good guy, why didn't they let him join his family?"