ACLU Lobbyist Honored by Top Arab-American Group for Post-9/11 Rights Work

June 13, 2003 12:00 am

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WASHINGTON – In recognition of his work on behalf of immigrants targeted unjustly by the government in the aftermath of 9/11, Timothy Edgar, an American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist, was honored today with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s (AADC) annual Pro Bono Attorney of the Year award.

“Mr. Edgar’s work represents our commitment as an organization that the war on terror not become a war on immigrants and that our safety and our freedom need not be mutually exclusive in the post-9/11 era,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU’s Legislative Office in Washington, DC.

Hired shortly before the attacks of September 11, Edgar has led the ACLU’s legislative advocacy around immigration and national security issues for nearly two years. In that time, he has lobbied Congress on many high-profile policy initiatives, including the USA PATRIOT Act, the move by the Department of Justice to allow local and state police to enforce complex immigration laws and the President’s order authorizing military tribunals.

As Arabs, Muslims and South Asians have increasingly become the targets of racial, ethnic and religious profiling, Edgar’s advocacy has included resisting the FBI’s plan to actively link a quota for investigations to the number of mosques and Muslims in that area, and a push for reforms at the FBI in light of revelations from its internal watchdog that the Bureau and the INS had mistreated detainees rounded up in the months after 9/11.

Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, is also scheduled to speak at the AADC’s conference on the struggle for immigrants’ rights in the aftermath of 9/11 and the criticisms in the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, which detailed the abuse of the 9/11 detainees.

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