WASHINGTON, March 16: The case of a Pakistani truck driver reveals something of the heartbreak and dislocation experienced by more than 1,000 immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia rounded up in the post-Sept 11 sweep by US authorities.

Most were detained for immigration violations, and many have been released and sent home. But some, like the truck driver, Anser Mahmoud, remain in custody, awaiting deportation. His family, wife and three children, have been forced to sell off their house in New Jersey and return to Pakistan.

Mahmoud’s story was the subject of a report on Public Broadcasting Service’s Now programme televised on Friday night that included interviews with Mahmoud’s wife and children conducted shortly before they left for Pakistan.

Mahmoud was arrested because he was a Pakistani and had a licence to drive vehicles cleared to carry hazardous material. He was arrested immediately after the Sept 11 attacks when authorities suspected that he had refused to deliver a load in Washington DC and turned back towards New Jersey. His attorney says his employers had asked Mahmoud to return to New Jersey when they learnt of the attack on the Pentagon.

After his detention, it was found that Mahmoud had two Pakistani passports in his name, had overstayed his visa and did not have a work permit.

While these violations reflect the out-of-status plight of a majority of the immigrants detained and certainly cannot be justified on legal grounds, they would probably have gone unnoticed but for the Sept 11 attacks. Even now there must be thousands of immigrants from Latin America living without proper documentation in the United States.

Mahmoud explains the two passports in his possession by saying that he had lost his first one and had a second issued by the embassy. Later he found the old one also in his belongings and kept both.

He has been detained in a special unit in a federal prison in New York that has been nicknamed The Hole by prisoners because of the conditions that prevail there. His wife, Uzma, was allowed to see him three months after he was detained. Amnesty International only the other day described conditions in which prisoners arrested after Sept 11 were being kept as inhuman and degrading.

Unable to keep up with her mortgage payments after her husband’s arrest, Uzama had to put up the family house for sale after the bank concerned filed for foreclosure. Deportation proceedings were initiated against her for overstaying her visa, and she has now gone home with her three sons (one of whom was born here and is thus a US citizen), one-way tickets being provided for the family by an Islamic charity. Mahmoud has been cleared of any connection with the terrorist attacks, but now has to be cleared for deportation. His wife hopes he will be able to join the family in a month or so.

The widespread arrests of immigrants are just many of the post-Sept 11 developments that have worried civil rights advocates here and abroad. Detentions have been based on racial profiling and rules have been amended to allow for detention without bail or court appearances. There have been other erosions of civil liberties that affect every American, native-born or immigrant, such as increased wiretaps and mail intercepts.

The presenter of Friday’s programme on Mahmoud, Bill Murray, referred to the fact that during World War II, Britain had refused to curtail civil liberties or democratic freedoms even in the face of the constant German blitz of its cities. Murray wondered what “my country loses when we fight a war against terrorism in the wrong way.”