"All black Africans were singled out whether they were law-abiding immigrants, illegal or legal workers, honest or dishonest people," a senior Western diplomat said.

Representative Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, disagreed, saying many law-abiding immigrants would be harmed.

Immigration officials in Washington have said that they are not going to deport law-abiding Central American immigrants who are applying for political asylum.

As Mayor Bloomberg explained, "Our general policy in this area protects the confidentiality of law-abiding immigrants, regardless of their status, when they report a crime or visit a hospital or send their children to school" [7].

In addition, the demonstrators called for an end to civil liberty violations against immigrants, complaining that many law-abiding immigrants have faced harassment and detentions since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The scheme - an apparent attempt to win favor with conservative factions - would divert law enforcement personnel from essential duties and intimidate the generally hard-working and law-abiding immigrants who aid our local economy.

Detractors have criticized him for diverting his time and energy from law-abiding immigrants to help dead lawbreakers, but he insisted that most mules act out of desperation, not greed.

I can only imagine how many names of patriotic, law-abiding Eastern European immigrants like my father are to be found in the millions of documents being released by the F.B.I. and other agencies.

The growing quandary for the new antiterror strategy is its effect on millions of law-abiding immigrants from the Middle East who were thrown under suspicion after the Sept. 11 attacks, and even more so since Madrid.

The immigration service is caught between trying to fix a program that last year granted citizenship to 180,000 immigrants without proper background checks, and swearing in tens of thousands of law-abiding immigrants with minimal delay.