WASHINGTON, Jan 27: Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a bill in Congress seeking green cards for the family of a Pakistani who was shot dead after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Holt, a Democratic Congressman from New Jersey, has been helping the Hasan family to stay in this country ever since Waqar Hasan was killed.
He has now taken the Hasan case directly to Congress by introducing a private bill that would grant green card status specifically to the family. Private bills are passed by Congress in exceptional cases to benefit a particular individual or family.
Holt’s bill is the Hasan family’s last hope of attaining legal permanent residency in the United States.
“Waqar Hasan lost his life for no other reason than he was a Muslim with a “Middle Eastern” face,” says a posting on the official website of Congressman Holt.
An angry young man walked into his convenience store in Dallas, Texas, on the night of Sept 15, 2001, a few days after 9/11, ordered two hamburgers, and then shot the 46-year-old father of four in the cheek with a .380 calibre handgun. Nothing was taken from the store.
When asked by police why he shot Waqar, 32-year-old Mark Anthony Stroman expressed no remorse: “I did it to retaliate on local Arab Americans or whatever you want to call them,” he said. “I did what every American wanted to do but didn’t.”
Before he was murdered, Waqar had taken steps to become an American citizen. He was in the United States on an immigrant visa, but he had filed a petition with the INS for green cards for himself and his family. His killing placed his family’s American future in jeopardy. Their visas and green card applications were both dependent upon his visa.
“When he died, their visas and hope of American citizenship died with him,” said Holt. “The Hasan family had lost their husband, father, and breadwinner, and now they were also facing the threat of deportation.”
For the last year, Rep. Holt has been working with government agencies to keep the Hasan family in this country. Today, however, they remain in a sort of bureaucratic limbo.
Although Rep. Holt helped them receive temporary working permits from the INS, those permits expire in April and there is no guarantee they will be renewed.
Mrs Hasan works the night shift on an assembly line at a Styrofoam cup factory. Her older daughters all work after school.
Agencies add: US congressional Democrats moved to deny President George W. Bush the moral high ground on national security as they unveiled a high-profile panel to help fashion their own platform on military and intelligence issues ahead of 2004 election.
The advisory group will be headed by William Perry, a soft-spoken academic who served as defence secretary in the administration of president Bill Clinton.
The group will work with Senate Democrats on terrorism, homeland security and related issues, according to Senate Democratic Minority Leader Tom Daschle.
“America faces a range of new and increasingly dangerous threats, and we need a national security strategy that effectively responds to the world as it is and permits us to work with our friends to make it better,” Daschle said in a statement.
Public opinion polls show Americans have traditionally trusted Republicans more than Democrats to handle national security issues.
A recent Gallup survey indicated 63 percent of them approved of Bush’s handling of national defence, compared to 32 percent who disapproved.
The absence of a coherent Democratic national security strategy is largely blamed for the party’s loss of control of the Senate and several seats in the House of Representatives in last year’s November elections.