SAN FRANCISCO – As the second deadline of the registration program goes into affect, the ACLU of Northern California is calling upon Senators Diane Feinstein, Senator Barbara Boxer and the northern California congressional delegation to urge Attorney General John Ashcroft to “suspend implementation of the National Security Entry-exit Registration System (NSEERS) until Congress can conduct an independent review of the system.” The letters were sent following the mass detention of hundreds of Middle Eastern and African men when they went to register last month at the Immigration and Naturalization Service offices in Los Angeles.

“The program comes on the heels of earlier Justice Department programs to question thousands of innocent non-citizens and even some U.S. citizens from primarily Muslim countries based exclusively on country-of-origin, age, and gender,” says Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California.

The Department of Justice program – NSEERS – requires all nonimmigrant men over the age of 16 from a list of 18 Muslim countries, North Korea and Eritrea to appear before INS offices to be fingerprinted, photographed and interviewed. They are also required to check in regularly with the government every year thereafter.

“The Justice Department’s pattern of targeting persons based on ethnicity, religion, or national origin, rather than on any individualized suspicion has the affect of alienating immigrant communities that the government should be reaching out to in the course of their investigation,” says the letter.

The letter calls on Congress “to ensure that the registration program is not a thinly-veiled program of detention based solely on ethnicity and religion.”

Senator Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin) recently sent a letter to Attorney General Ashcroft urging suspension of the program pending Congressional review.