A class action has been filed in federal court in Los Angeles by Arab and Muslim groups against Ashcroft and the INS over last week's arrest and detention of over 1,000 Middle-Eastern men who went to register in accordance with a new government regulation.

"Local immigration lawyers estimated last week that 1,000 men and boys were detained in standing-room-only centers and forced to sleep on concrete floors, under a system designed to track potential terrorists but that instead locked up many caught in the lengthy process for obtaining permanent residence.

The lead attorney for the detainees is Peter Schey, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. Schey said mass registration was irrational because "no undocumented terrorist will come forward."

Schey said the lawsuit was not about resisting registration but about the way it was being implemented. "The program is being used as a scam to lure people into INS offices supposedly to register, when what they really face is arrest, detention and even deportation despite their pending petitions to legalize their status which the INS refuses to process," he said."

Since the new registration requirement applies to males age 16 and older, several teens were among those locked up on visa issues. We wrote about them here, and our problems with the registration program and the mass arrests here.

What's next? Rounding non-Americans up and putting them into camps? Remember all those new beds the Government is building at Guantamo? Who's going to fill them? The Government's answer is "enemy-combatants." But remember, under Bush, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld's plan, they get to choose who the enemy combatents are, they get to hold them in secret without access to lawyers and they claim their decisions are not reviewable by our courts.

At what point will people join to speak out against this unprecedented executive power grab? The class action suit by Muslim and Arab Americans is a good first step, but we need the American public to join behind them and offer support. Today it's their liberty rights being impinged upon. Next year it could be your's or your child's. Then what?

Update: Matt Yglesias on this topic today:

"Everyone ought to consider the fact that there's a quite real chance that in the not-too-distant future we'll see another terrorist attack with thousands of casualties. Maybe next time around the killers will know not to blow up an office building until late enough in the day that it's full. Or maybe there'll be a WMD attack killing not thousands, but tens or even hundreds of thousands."

"I bring this up both to remind people that the government is getting paranoid about security with good reason, but also to remind you that the level of terrorism-related panic could get much higher in the future and with it could come popular support for really and truly repressive measures. A person's going to have no standing whatsoever to make the case against something like, say, the wholesale internment of America's Arab population if he's been spending the past two years running around screaming "the sky is falling" every time the government says Arab immigrants are worthy of more scrutiny than other immigrants."