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CONTRA COSTA TIMES – July 13, 2004 Attorney Banafsheh forms the National Legal By Jack Chang SAN FRANCISCO - An attorney who has defended hundreds of Middle Easterners and Muslims is starting what she says will be a lead organization championing communities put on the defensive by suspicion and investigation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Attorney Banafsheh Akhlaghi said the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement will address the plight of Muslims and other communities as a civil rights matter, similar to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. "There is another group that has now come forward as a group with the light shined on them, rounded up and shackled," said the Iranian-born attorney. "It's time to turn up the volume on the voices of our clients, and I believe America's ready to hear it." Akhlaghi said she plans to model the new organization on the venerable National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has defended African-Americans for nearly a century. Representatives of the new group will lobby lawmakers, defend individual clients, argue legal cases that could set broad public policy and educate the public about affected communities. Since Sept. 11, Akhlaghi has been one of the nation's most visible defenders of immigrants embroiled in federal responses to the attacks, having represented more than 600 clients, many threatened with deportation after obeying mandates to register with immigration authorities. She said the legal sanctuary group will serve any community, from Indian Sikhs to Lebanese Christians to African-American Muslims, affected by post-Sept. 11 policies. Established advocacy groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations already defend some communities. What will distinguish Akhlaghi's organization is the reach of the people it will represent, said Dalia Hashad, an ACLU staff member who will serve on the legal sanctuary's advisory board. That body also includes former federal immigration judge Paul Grussendorf and Dorothy Ehrlich, head of the ACLU's Northern California chapter. "The legal sanctuary is more expansive and broader than anything we've seen before," Hashad said. "We need an organization that addresses these issues across the board because the discrimination is across the board." Since the attacks, Hashad said, she has worked with dozens of Muslims, Middle Easterners and South Asians who have lost jobs, been castigated at schools and otherwise been discriminated against. A graduate of the University of San Francisco and Tulane University, Akhlaghi left Contra Costa County's John F. Kennedy University shortly after Sept. 11 to represent dozens of Muslims and Middle Easterners who needed help. Her private firm will close next month to make way for the new nonprofit organization, which will start small with Akhlaghi, two paid staff members and a handful of volunteers. |