"Appalling" was the term U.S. Rep. John Conyers used to describe the conditions in which local Muslim leader Rabih Haddad is being held following his detainment for an immigration violation. Haddad, who is being held at the Metropolitan Corrections Center in Chicago, is currently undergoing deportation hearings in Detroit for overstaying a six-month visa.

Conyers (D-Detroit), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, visited Haddad yesterday at the corrections center. Haddad, a Lebanese national, was transferred there after being arrested and detained in Michigan.

"He lives in a poorly lit empty six foot by nine foot cell and is only permitted to meet with his wife twice a week and call home four times a month," Conyers said in a written statement.

Haddad has claimed that cockroaches also infest his cell.

"The treatment of Imam Haddad has highlighted everything that is abusive and unconstitutional about our government's scapegoating of immigrants in the wake of the September 11th attacks," Conyers said. "The use of secret evidence and cruel conditions of confinement against a man with no criminal record who has publicly condemned the terrorist act against our country."

Haddad is a co-founder of the Global Relief Foundation, a local nonprofit organization whose assets were frozen by the government, which alleged that the GRF had been funding terrorists.

Randall Sanborn, spokesman for the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, which is handling the case, refused to comment on the incarceration.

"For an alien who is an overstay, the government doesn't have a tough time proving it because they know when he came in," said William Dance, a Troy-based attorney specializing in immigration. "The record shows his original stay, as well as any extension

Haddad's hearings in Detroit before a federal immigration judge have been ordered closed to the public after his case's classification by the Justice Department as a "special interest" case, which refers to cases connected to the government's investigations into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Conyers, along with the Detroit Free Press and the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, have sued the government to open up the case on First and Sixth Amendment grounds. They are also asserting that closing the hearings is unconstitutional.

The government has fought the suit, arguing that there is no constitutional right of access to a removal hearing and that, even if there were, national security warrants a closed hearing.

"The closure directive is amply justified by the exigent circumstances presented by the unprecedented September 11 attacks on United States soil and the (Justice) Department's compelling need to avoid disclosures about immigration detainees apprehended through its terrorism investigations which could convey important information about the investigations' focus and status," U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins of the Eastern District of Michigan wrote, along with attorneys from the Justice Department's Office of Immigration Litigation, in a brief filed in the U.S. District Court in Detroit.

Dance said national security is the only reason he has ever heard cited as a reason for closing an immigration hearing.