Today is the deadline in Attorney General John Ashcroft's controversial immigrant fingerprinting and tracking program. The American Civil Liberties Union "has called on the Justice Department to rethink the plan - which the ACLU says is full of holes - and advised immigrants to seek counsel before registering."

The program requires many citizens of five predominantly Arab or Muslim countries - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria - to be fingerprinted at designated Immigration and Naturalization Service offices or face deportation.

"By January 10, 2003, citizens of 13 additional countries - Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen - must also submit to registration. "

"Failure to register could lead to arrest and deportation of otherwise lawful visitors, according to the INS. Adding to the anxiety, some Arab and Muslim visitors with pending immigration petitions were detained when they came in to be fingerprinted."

"By all accounts, the INS’s problems are actually stemming from a surplus of information, not insufficient investigatory powers, the ACLU said. For instance, the INS failed to process more than 200,000 change of address forms, which are piling up in an abandoned limestone mine outside Kansas City, MO that doubles as the largest underground records facility in the world, putting hundreds of thousands at risk of wrongful arrest and deportation."

"This program appears to be a thinly veiled effort to trigger massive and discriminatory deportations of certain immigrants whose only mistake will be to fail to register because they are confused and afraid, not because they have violated any existing immigration law or pose any threat to the United States," said Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project."