Lawsuit Challenges McCarran Act, Deportation of 8 Alleged Marxists

A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Friday designed to declare unconstitutional parts of the 35-year-old McCarran-Walter immigration law and to block the deportation of eight immigrants whom the government alleges belong to a Marxist Palestinian group.

Arguments on the lawsuit were scheduled to be heard before U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson on April 27, a day before the immigrants’ scheduled deportation hearing, Paul Hoffman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said.

Separately, a top FBI official said that the government, in its efforts to deport the immigrants, was not trampling on their constitutional rights nor attempting to stifle their political ideas.

The immigrants--seven Palestinians traveling on Jordanian passports and a Kenyan--have been accused of participating in activities, including the dissemination of magazines, supporting a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

For years, civil rights groups have complained that the McCarran-Walter Act, passed during the height of the McCarthy Era over the veto of President Harry S. Truman--has been used to deny visas to important writers and other notable figures simply because of their political views.

First Court Test

But ACLU attorney Hoffman told a news conference in Los Angeles that this was the first time that specific McCarran-Walter provisions have been constitutionally tested in the courts. Among those are one making dissemination of literature and speech advocating world communism deportable offenses.

“The reach of the statute is breathtaking in scope,” he said.

Under the complaint, which also seeks an injunction to stop the April 28 deportation hearing, the government could not use the law either to investigate or deport the eight defendants.

The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, the Irish National Caucus, the American Friends Service Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens and several other civil and human rights groups and the eight defendants against the U.S. attorney general and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It accused the government of suppressing the immigrants’ “right to receive ideas” and of abridging “their rights of speech, press and political freedom.”

A simultaneous news conference announcing the lawsuit was held in Washington to kick off the national convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

A ‘Direct Attack’

Khader Musa Hamide, identified by the government as the California leader of the PFLP, told reporters that the deportation proceedings amounted to “a direct attack at the Arab-American community” and an attempt “to silence this community. . . .”

In Los Angeles, another defendant, Michel Ibrahim Shehadeh, said that the Arab community “wants to enjoy constitutional rights, civil liberties like everyone else. But it seems just being an Arab in general, or a Palestinian in particular, is a statement they want to suppress.”

David J. Habib Jr., a Westlake Village attorney who is the Southern California American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee president, charged that “loose guns at the highest levels of this government” were smothering the constitutional rights of Arabs in the United States, particularly those of Palestinians.

Such views were rebutted by the FBI’s executive assistant director for investigations, Oliver B. Revell, who told the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s luncheon that the constitutional rights of the immigrants would be preserved.

“Neither the Justice Department, Immigration Service nor FBI have any interest whatsoever in denying any individual or groups of their constitutional right to engage in political dissent,” Revell said.

Ronald L. Soble reported from Los Angeles and Victor Hull from Washington.