WASHINGTON, March 21: Despite opposition from civil rights groups, the Bush administration intends to continue its drive to question Muslim and other Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States.

It has already carried out “voluntary interviews” with some 2,000 young people out of a total of nearly 5,000 it had marked out for questioning in the first phase of the operation.

The expansion of the process, which is meant to seek out information on Al Qaeda activities, was announced by Attorney-Gen John Ashcroft on Wednesday. He acknowledged that failure to find almost half of those on the original list of interviews indicated serious flaws in the government’s ability to keep a track of people arriving in the US.

Nevertheless, the administration is giving a positive spin to the first round of interviews, saying it had been able to get useful information in some cases and obtained leads for further investigations.

It also claimed that the exercise has in fact brought the Justice Department officials closer to the Muslim community, a claim that is hotly disputed by community organizations, who describe it as an instance of racial profiling. The president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, said the administration was merely compounding its first error with another one and was misleading public opinion by claiming that the first round of questioning produced valuable information and built trust.

The ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives judiciary committee, Representative John Conyers, was quoted in Thursday’s papers as saying: “The suggestion that Arab and Muslim Americans appreciate being singled out and interrogated is a prime example of the attorney-general’s wartime propaganda machine in full swing.”