Five American Muslims filed a lawsuit against FBI Director Christopher Wray and other members of the government because they believe they were put on a terrorist watch list without due process.
The complaint, filed Wednesday to the district court for the Northern District of Texas, says that the plaintiffs are victims of racial profiling and have suffered negative consequences due to their inclusion on the list.
The Terrorist Screening Database, a federal list of terror suspects, is a secret list compiled by the FBI, and it’s impossible for people to verify whether or not they have been included on it. But lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, say people who are on the list know they were included because they are frequently harassed by law enforcement officials and consistently have their rights violated. Often they are singled out at airports by having the letters SSSS stamped on their boarding passes.
Abraham Sbyti, a 45-year-old based in Texas, told Newsweek he has been stopped and questioned by law enforcement officials in airports 24 times since 2014. Sbyti, who is employed as an air-conditioning technician, is originally from Iraq and was re-settled in the U.S. as a refugee in 2000. He obtained citizenship in 2005 and lives with his wife in Texas, but he visits his mother in Lebanon a few times a year.
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