Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Kimberly Lane, a teacher at
Heritage High School, expressed
dismay after the arrest.
Posted on 04/09/2005 4:32:16 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Kimberly Lane, a teacher at
Heritage High School, expressed
dismay after the arrest.
At Heritage High School in East Harlem, where the student idiom is hip-hop and salsa, the 16-year-old Guinean girl stood out, but not just because she wore Islamic dress. She was so well liked that when she ran for student body president, she came in second to one of her best friends - the Christian daughter of the president of the parent-teacher association, Deleen P. Carr.
Now Ms. Carr, a speech pathologist who calls herself "a typical American citizen," is as outraged as the girl's teachers and classmates, who have learned that the girl and another 16-year-old are being called would-be suicide bombers and are being held in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania.
"They have painted this picture of her as this person that is trying to destroy our way of life, and I know in my heart of hearts that this is bogus," said Ms. Carr, who welcomed the Guinean girl to her house daily and knows her family well. "I feel like, how dare they? She's a minor, and even if she's not a citizen, she has rights as a human being."
According to a government document provided to The New York Times by a federal official earlier this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has asserted that both girls are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based on evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." No evidence was cited, and federal officials will not comment on the case.
Its mysteries deepened as teachers and neighbors gave details of the Guinean girl's life, like the jeans she wore under her Muslim garb, her lively classroom curiosity about topics like Judaism and art and her after-school care for four younger siblings while her parents, illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States since 1990, eked out a living.
"I just can't fathom this," said her art teacher, Kimberly Lane, who has repeatedly called the youth detention center but like Ms. Carr was not allowed to speak to the girl, who has no lawyer. Among the unanswered questions they raised was why, if she was really a suspect, no F.B.I. agent had shown up to search her school locker or question her classmates, who sent her letters of support.
"This is a girl who's been in this country since she was 2 years old," Ms. Lane said. "She's just a regular teenager - like, two weeks ago her biggest worry was whether she'd done her homework or studied for a science test."
Until now, attention has focused on the other 16-year-old, a Bangladeshi girl reared in Queens who could not deal with the hurly-burly of her West Side high school and withdrew into home schooling. Yesterday, on a motion of the government, an immigration judge closed the Bangladeshi girl's bond hearing to the public and adjourned it to next Thursday, said Troy Mattes, a lawyer who is taking over the case but has yet to meet her.
By the Bangladeshi girl's account, reported by her mother, the girls did not meet until March 24, after their separate arrests in early-morning raids on immigration charges against their parents. Both grew up in Islamic families. But while the Bangladeshi girl had grown increasingly pious, and uncomfortable in the urban culture of the High School of Environmental Studies on West 56th Street, the Guinean girl, a 10th grader, embraced every aspect of Heritage High, at 106th Street and Lexington Avenue, her teachers said.
"She is, yes, an orthodox Muslim, but completely integrated into this school," said Jessica Siegel, her English teacher in a class in which topics like teenage pregnancy and world politics were discussed. Ms. Siegel was profiled in the book "Small Victories," by Samuel G. Freedman, as an unsentimental, but fiercely committed teacher who provoked and delighted her students.
"She's a wonderful, wonderful girl," Ms. Siegel said. "She's about the last person anyone could imagine being a suicide bomber."
The English teacher's most vivid recollection was of a day two months ago when she heard a kind of roar in the hallway of the school, which is full of colorful student collages and life-size sculptures in papier-mâché. The teenager had stopped wearing her veil, and she beamed as her fellow students, seeing her face for the first time, cheered.
After the class read "Night," the Holocaust memoir by Elie Wiesel, the girl wrote a paper about genocide in the Sudan, she recalled. But she was so excited about a field trip to see Christo's "Gates" in Central Park, Ms. Siegel said, that she skipped an appointment at immigration - a teenage impulse the teacher now worries might have set off problems with federal authorities. Her father is now in immigration jail facing deportation.
At Woodrow Wilson Houses a few blocks from the school, a sticker on the family's apartment door reads, "Allah is our protector." Yesterday no one was home, but across the hall, Christine Anderson, a neighbor, shook her head in disbelief when she learned why she had not seen the girl or her father in recent weeks.
"Why would they take the lady's daughter?" she asked. "They're nice people, and hard-working people. I've been here four years. I know she's not a problem child."
Ms. Lane, the art teacher, said that when Heritage High first learned that immigration agents had picked up the girl, one of her best friends asked if someone from the school might have denounced her as an illegal immigrant. "I remember telling her the government doesn't go after 16-year-old girls," Ms. Lane said. "And in the last few days, I'm wrestling with the fact that, yes, it does."
Was no one at her school upset she was an illegal immigrant? I am really getting upset over the government's complete lack of effort to stop illegal immigration. Maybe we need Minutemen at all our airports, seaports, etc.
Well, mebbe not for immigration offenses, Ms. Lane. But for conspiracy to commit murder (or similar charge) I sure hope they do go after 16 year old girls if they're the perps.
In any event, illegal aliens.
16 year olds have killed a lot of people.
The US media is forever focused on "another Columbine" when they really should be prepared for "another Beslan".
The gun grabbers could care less about international terrorism.
So both her parents are here illegally the whole time while they have 5 kids - this sounds like the federal government isn't securing the borders at all.
Why are they here?..Deport the whole bunch.
And, I guess the schools in NYC ignore the immigration status of the kids...although I do not know much about their official (and unofficial) practices with this issue.
i have the feeling that you are right. there are probably many potential terrorists who are young people who don't match the public's perception of a terrorist.
i am curious about the evidence, of course.
Wanna bet thhis teacher is a major leftie?
Kimberly Lane (Ed.M., 2004), was selected to be a MetLife Fellow by the Teachers Network Policy Institute (TNPI), an honor shared by over 100 exemplary elementary, middle and high school teachers representing 12 TNPI affiliates nationwide. Lane teaches art and heads the art department at The Heritage School, a public high school located in East Harlem established by Judith Burton, Professor of Art Education at TC, who opened the school in collaboration with the New York City Board of Education in September 1997.
Yep--she sounds like an activist lefty. No question.
That's the problem with illegal aliens, they think they have a right to be here.
They left out how a spokesman from Islamic Circle of North America is speaking out for these girls, which makes me very suspicious. They, like CAIR, have an agenda.
I also have to wonder about a girl -brought up in a strict enough Muslim household that she wears muslim dress including a full veil- who starts wearing jeans underneath and then one day shows up without the veil. I find it very hard to believe the parents would allow that, especially at that age.
Illegal immigrants should be deported. Period.
But as to the bigger issue, whether this girl was conspiring to become a suicide bomber... this whole thing sounds like a massive FBI screw-up to me. (Note to FR: the FBI does screw up.)
Suicide bombers don't make their own bombs. Where's the bomb? Where's the bomb-maker? Where's the arrest of a bomb-maker?
Shouldn't the FBI be interested in finding the bomb, and finding the bomb maker? Wouldn't it have been more interesting to surveil this girl (assuming she really was conspiring to become a suicide bomber) and find the bomb, and find the bomb maker.
The fact that there is no bomb, and is no bomb maker, makes me think the obvious: a typical case of govt assocrats with their heads stuck so far up that the sh1t they have for brains has become constipated.
Gotcha.
"She looks and acts innocent to me, so she certainly must be." Ummmm...
No one believed that charming Ted Bundy was a serial killer.
No one believed that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were long-term spies.
No one believed that the massive Twin Towers would be there one day and gone the following day.
It's amazing how people ignore facts and rules when bamboozled by social engineering. She is innocent until proven guilty, but where is CAIR in this case?
"The feds certainly have something here (my guess is recorded telephone conversations) or else they would not have moved as they did."
Yes, it's very difficult to think they'd have arrested two teenage girls (who seem to have had no connection to each other, which is re-iterated in this piece) if they didn't have some EXTREMELY solid evidence. I mean the PR alone makes it not worth it, never mind the fact that no one would believe it. Not like arresting some thuggish young men and saying it was LIKELY they were a threat. (Most teenage girls aren't a threat to anything, except of course their parents sanity. Only in Iran and other Muslims countries is that considered a crime, not here. Or every single one of them would be in jail RIGHT NOW!).
And as for all this talk in the article about how she'd be the last person to become a suicide bomber, I suggest those folks check out some of the fine young ladies, from "palestine" and elsewhere who have already gone kablooey.
But she can’t be a terrorist threat! She was well liked! </ sarcasm>
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