Manlin Chee, Another Benchmark in Government Repression
Signe Waller
For the government to have a free hand in the bloody domination of Iraq and the reshaping of the Middle East to suit the glory and profit of Empire—euphemistically called promoting democracy—it must repress dissent at home.
The vicious federal prosecution and March 2, 2005 sentencing in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, of Manlin Chee, who was a top lawyer for immigrant rights, sends a chilling message about repression of civil liberties aimed at immigrants and their defenders.
A naturalized citizen from Singapore, Chee built a practice in North Carolina that earned her accolades and awards. She was called by the Triad Business News “one of the foremost immigration attorneys in North Carolina, if not the country” and received the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award in 1991 from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Selfless and compassionate, Manlin Chee went the extra mile to assist her poor and immigrant clients, one the most vulnerable and powerless sectors of society. She navigated them through a convoluted immigration bureaucracy, and she helped them obtain work, credit, education and housing. Chee took on her clients’ burdens as if they were the problems of her own family.
Since 2001, Chee has publicly and courageously opposed the excesses of the “war on terrorism.” She has expressed her strong sense of injustice at the targeted repression and violation of civil rights of immigrants and Muslims after 9/11.With perhaps the largest caseload of Muslim clients in the area, Chee showed solidarity by wearing Muslim dress and veil each Friday, saying that if people cannot identify the Muslims they cannot target them for discrimination. She was very vocal in criticizing the post-9/11 “Special Registration” of certain immigrants. The profiling of innocent nationals of targeted and predominantly Muslim countries, Chee argued, was not unlike the registrations required in early Nazi Germany. Chee accompanied clients to their registrations to prevent them from being secretly deported. The “Special Registrations” are now suspended, but hundreds of immigrants who voluntarily complied were deported or disappeared unaccountably after they registered.
In March 2003, at a well-attended and repeatedly televised public forum at the main library in Greensboro, Manlin Chee criticized the U.S.A. Patriot Act as an attack on the Bill of Rights. She warned people, prophetically, that if the government succeeded in violating the rights of immigrants it would be emboldened to come after anyone who disagreed with its politics. Shortly afterward, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security moved in on Chee.
Federal agents harassed Attorney Manlin Chee, probing into every aspect of her personal and professional life. They threatened past and present clients and employees of her law practice, went through thousands of her files and financial records, and even questioned the validity of her 1973 marriage that produced three children.
The selective prosecution of Chee included sending two wired FBI informants—both immigrants—into her office to bait her into violating the letter of immigration law. In an effort to help one of the purported clients obtain legal documents that would permit him to remain in the U.S., Chee tried to arrange a sham marriage. The other undercover agent, posing as a homosexual who would face persecution and possible death if made to return to Egypt, got Chee to sign a false affidavit indicating he had a gay relationship so that he might obtain political asylum. On November 23, 2004, Chee pled guilty to charges of defrauding the U.S. by submitting false paperwork on behalf of these immigrant “clients.”
In this entrapment scenario, the lever was not money but Chee’s compassionate nature. The sting succeeded and the FBI built a case against Chee—one that they, apparently, had been unable to make when searching through thousands of her records for violations. They also resorted to the slimy tactic of threatening to imprison one of her daughters who had worked in Chee’s law office. Consequently, just before the case was to go before a jury, the mother felt pressured to plead guilty to the fraud charges generated by the sting operation in order to spare her daughter a prison sentence.
The government dropped about twenty other charges, some dealing with labor certification documents, that Chee’s very able attorney Locke Clifford was prepared to show in court were unfounded. However, these dropped charges were re-introduced at Chee’s sentencing hearing—where a lower standard of evidence pertains than in a jury trial—in an attempt to use them to “enhance,” i.e., increase, her sentence.
To a lay person it seems outrageous that dropped charges can be re-raised in this manner and that the person charged can be, in effect, deprived of a jury trial and made to answer the charges against her before a sole judge. However, it is legal, and it speaks to the determination of the Justice Department to make an example of Manlin Chee by insuring that she received an active sentence.
Judge James A. Beaty had the option of punishing Chee with probation only, but acceded to the government and sentenced her to a year in prison, despite the fact that the Asian-American woman had given up her law practice and that she suffers from depression and anxiety disorder, that was occasioned or aggravated by the relentless harassment she endured from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The persecution of Manlin Chee occurs in the same climate as the February 10, 2005 conviction of Lynne Stewart, a New York civil liberties lawyer, who vigorously defended her client, a Muslim cleric convicted of being a terrorist by the U.S. government. National Lawyers Guild president Michael Avery said, “The government is bent on intimidating attorneys from providing zealous representation to unpopular clients.” He urged NLG members and all defense attorneys to oppose the oppressive attacks by government on the civil liberties of everyone in this country.
Greensboro, where Manlin Chee had her main office, is both a big city and a small town. Birthplace of some of the most progressive and innovative social activism (the 1960’s sit-ins and the present-day Truth and Reconciliation Commission), it is also the home of some of the most conservative and politically reactionary forces in the country.
When I was introduced to Chee last November at a Manlin Chee Defense Committee fundraiser she told me that the first time the FBI investigated her had to do with me. That got my attention as I did not recall ever having met her. Just out of law school, Chee was employed by the Human Relations Commission in Greensboro in November 1979 when she was told by her boss to go to a funeral home where the bodies of people were laid out who had been killed the previous day in a Klan and Nazi terrorist attack on labor and community organizers at an anti-Klan rally.
Widowed by that attack, I was at the funeral parlor. Chee remembers that I spoke although I have no recollection of her (nor of the speech she says I made). My friends and I later learned that the Communist Workers Party, sponsor of the anti-Klan rally, was being investigated by the FBI during that period. Although Chee was sent to the funeral parlor as part of her job, her boss let her know that the FBI had taken an interest in her presence at the wake of the slain CWP members. It may be that the FBI thought she was a CWP member, since that organization had many Asian Americans. Eventually the feds figured out that she had nothing to do with the CWP and left her alone.
During the many years that Chee built up her admirable law practice she had many routine encounters with the Justice Department and with FBI agents in her professional capacity as an immigration lawyer. She is not aware that they took any special interest in her between 1979 and 2003.
What triggered the investigation of Chee? The government is not likely to admit to a political rather than a criminal motive for the investigation. Part of the abuse of civil rights we are witnessing is the lack of accountability on the part of government—the FBI does not have to tell us why it investigated this particular immigrant attorney, went through her files and set up two sting operations. We are left, for now, with interpreting the fact that they began the stings on her shortly after she had championed Muslim rights and vocally opposed the Patriot Act.
On March 1, 2005, the first day of Chee’s sentencing hearing, an FBI agent and a Homeland Security agent sat at the table with government Attorney Hamilton. The FBI man was Agent Thomas Brereton. His father, now deceased, was also named Thomas Brereton and was also an FBI agent. Brereton senior was one of several FBI agents who knew in advance about the Klan and Nazi plan to attack our demonstration on November 3, 1979, and who did nothing to prevent the attack. Instead, Brereton senior attempted to cover up the government’s complicit role with the Klan and Nazis. Twenty-five years later, Brereton junior tried with all his might to add to Manlin Chee’s punishment at her sentencing hearing. The government abuse of civil rights that fostered a death squad in 1979 is an issue today as shown by the persecution of Manlin Chee. From father to son, the mindset of racist repression in government has not changed.
The Manlin Chee Defense Committee in Greensboro will continue to stand with former attorney Chee and to struggle against the tide of government repression. The group has been meeting to plan its future activities, including giving Chee a hero’s send-off when she is transferred to a West Virginia prison on April 22nd. Manlin Chee better fits the paradigm of Harriet Tubman who violated the law to help slaves to freedom than the common white-collar criminal that the government, itself a colossal lawbreaker, tried to make her out to be.
Signe Waller is a freelance writer and a participant in the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project in Greensboro, North Carolina.
<<Furthermore, we must ask what does the dialectician want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want? It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it-only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.>> -Gilles Deleuze "Nietzche & Philosophy"
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