NEW YORK, June 7: Over 13,000 Arab and Muslim men who came forward to register during the recent immigration registration programme (NSEERS) are likely to be deported, said the New York Times.

Out of the 82,000 men older than 16 who registered, over 13,000 have been found to be living in the US illegally, the immigration officials told the paper.

In all, deportations of illegal immigrants from Asian and African countries have surged by nearly 27 per cent in the last two years. The number of Pakistanis, Jordanians, Lebanese and Moroccans deported during that time has doubled, while the number of Egyptians deported has nearly tripled, the paper said.

Pakistan embassy officials say since September 11 roundups more than 15,000 illegal Pakistanis have left the US for Canada, Europe and back home.

Although in most cases the government has not been able to establish any terrorism links, the immigration officials believe most will be expelled in what is likely to be the largest wave of deportation after the Sept 11 attacks, the paper said.

The paper said the fabric of neighbourhoods is thinning. Families are packing up; some are splitting up. Rather than come forward and risk deportation, an unknowable number of immigrants have burrowed deeper underground.

Others have simply left for Canada or for their homeland.

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the nation’s immigration system as a weapon in the battle against terror, the paper said.

For decades, illegal immigrants have often flourished because officials lacked the staff, resources and political will to deport them. But since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the government has been detaining and deporting illegal immigrants from countries considered as breeding grounds for terrorists.

“There’s been a major shift in our priorities,” Jim Chaparro, acting director for interior enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security, told the paper, which has subsumed the old immigration service.

Advocates for immigrants have also accused officials of practising selective enforcement by focusing on illegal immigrants from Arab and Muslim nations. Rather than disrupting communities, they say, the government should improve its intelligence and prosecution of terrorists.

“What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law,” Lucas Guttentag, director of the immigrants’ rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union told the paper. “The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way.”