13,000 Arab Muslim men face deportation from US

That is likely to produce the largest wave of deportations of Arab and Muslim men from the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the paper said.

Since that time, the US government has instituted much tighter controls on foreigners living on US soil, attempting to weed out suspected "terrorists" or prevent them from entering the country.

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Hence a special registration program required non-citizen men from 25 Arab and Muslim countries to register with US immigration authorities between December and April of this year.

Of the 82,000 who came forward, more than 13,000 were found to be in the United States illegally and now face deportation, the Times said.

But of those 82,000 men and "tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings" in the past six months, only 11 had links to "terrorism," it said.

Many came forward in false hopes their cooperation would result in leniency on the part of immigration officials.

"People did register out of their good conscience, because they wanted to follow the rules, respect the law," Fayiz Rahman of the American Muslim Council told AFP.

He charged that Attorney General John Ashcroft's policy is "targeted only towards Muslims.

"This is a major concern," he stressed. "They are planning to reduce the number of Muslims on American soil,... discourage Muslim immigration, make our lives difficult."

Other critics also say the policies are discriminatory.

"What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law," the paper quoted Lucas Guttentag of the American Civil Liberties Union as saying.

"The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way."

Many immigrants rounded up after the September 11 attacks were chained, physically and verbally abused, held without bail and denied access to lawyers, according to a Justice Department report released Monday.

"While our review recognised the enormous challenges and difficult circumstances confronting the department in responding to the terrorist attacks, we found significant problems in the way the detainees were handled," said the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.