June 11, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 10, 1424

WASHINGTON: Shahid Mahmood is about to come home, none too soon for his poor and elderly patients.

Hundreds of them have been without medical care since US immigration officials refused last month to let Mahmood re-enter the country after a trip to Pakistan because of an oversight that is also plaguing other foreign nationals who travel abroad. It took almost a month of pleading from lawyers and pressure from members of Congress before US diplomats relented last week and told Mahmood, a Pakistani citizen, he would be granted a new visa.

“The patients are thrilled,” Tracy Wall, office manager at Mahmood’s Al Shifa Clinic in rural Roxboro, N.C., said on Friday.

Other foreign visitors and students said they have run into similar problems for unintentional violations of a regulation adopted after the September 11, 2001, attacks that requires them to report to immigration officials before they leave the United States for even brief visits abroad.

Some commercial airline representatives have compounded the problem, the travellers said, by assuring them they need to report to the government only when they return. On other occasions, they said, they could not find any immigration officials at airports before departing.

Mahmood, who runs his clinic under a federal programme for medically under-served areas, left the United States with his wife and 2 1/2-year-old daughter in April to visit his sick father in Lahore.

Mahmood, 38, said he knew he could leave the country only through designated points of departure because his travel agent told him that, but he had no idea he was required to register with immigration officials before flying out of Dulles International Airport outside of Washington on April 24.

When he tried to return on May 11, he said in a telephone interview from Lahore, he was told he was in violation of the law for not having registered on April 24. He said the immigration officer with whom he spoke seemed sympathetic when Mahmood explained he had not been informed of the requirement when he registered with the government in late January under a special programme for visitors from mostly Muslim countries. But after the officer checked with a superior, Mahmood was told he would have to go back to Pakistan.

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the officers assigned to the programme were often too busy to spell out all the requirements to each registrant.

North Carolina lawmakers who tried to intervene on Mahmood’s behalf were initially informed by US embassy officials in Pakistan that no waiver could be granted. The consul general in Islamabad told Senator Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., on May 19 that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security had yet to develop rules permitting waiver relief.

The US diplomats were evidently unaware of a memo from Secretary of State Colin Powell to all embassies on May 10 allowing foreign nationals who show “good cause” for failing to comply with registration rules and who promise not to do it again to be granted new visas. Dole aides and a lawyer for Mahmood in North Carolina, Dayna Kelly, said they brought the memo to the diplomats’ attention at the end of May.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.