The lawsuit contends the U.S. government violated the constitutional rights of Wilwal, Abdigani and their four children by allegedly subjecting them to unreasonable search and seizure, and violating their right to due process when the family, all of whom are U.S. citizens, tried to reenter the United States on March 30, 2015. The family of six say they were stopped at the Canadian border on their way back home to Minnesota. They handed over their U.S. passports and the children’s birth certificates to a Border Patrol officer and waited in the car. Moments later, they say, three border officials emerged from their office,
guns drawn and pointed at the family. The children started screaming. Thus begins Abdisalam Wilwal and Sagal Abdigani’s account of their nearly 11-hour detention at the hands of Department of Homeland Security officials, according a lawsuit filed Thursday on their behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a private law firm, Robins Kaplan. The family’s ordeal, their lawyers claim, stem from Wilwal’s inclusion on the United States’s sprawling terrorist watch list. The case underscores long-running questions about the functionality and due process surrounding the database, said Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney on the ACLU’s National Security Project. The ACLU says the government placed Wilwal on the watch list without his knowledge and with no known justification. The lawsuit’s key arguments are these: first, that whatever discretion U.S. border authorities have to detain, search and interrogate people at points of entry — and they have a lot — they are still prohibited from violating a person’s constitutional rights. Border authorities did so by subjecting Wilwal to excessive force and the entire family to unconstitutional seizure, the lawyers say. Second, the lawsuit raises an older issue: while it might remain entirely unclear how a person ended up on the FBI’s watch list, there is no “fair and meaningful” process to seek removal — a fact that civil rights lawyers have long contended stands in violation of citizens’ Fifth Amendment due process rights. (The ACLU has been involved in similar litigation since 2010 regarding the much narrower no-fly list, which also includes U.S. citizens.) Abdigani and Wilwal, both refugees of Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s, have resided in the United States for 17 years.