A Jacksonville man found out he had been placed on a No Fly List when he tried to board a flight back home from Bosnia, and now he wants a chance to prove he poses no threat to the United States, Zijad Bosnic said in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
After months of waiting for approval in Sarajevo, Bosnic, a U.S. citizen and a Southside homeowner, finally arrived in Jacksonville late Wednesday night. The next day, he and attorneys with the Council on American-Islamic Relations went to the federal courthouse to sue the government.
The text of the lawsuit wasn’t available until late Thursday, so the Times-Union was unable to reach the federal government for comment. Those agencies routinely decline to comment on pending lawsuits.
The lawsuit asks the government to give people like Bosnic a “legal mechanism that affords them notice of the reason and bases for their placement on the federal terror watch list and a meaningful opportunity to contest their continued inclusion on the federal terror watch list.”
“This action is a violation of Bosnic’s substantive due process rights,” said one of Bosnic’s lawyers, Omar Saleh. “We hope this not only takes him off the list but makes the government think twice about how they formulate the list, and we’d like to make sure they come up with ways to give U.S. travelers notice.”
Bosnic was born in Bosnia in 1972, but he has lived in the United States since 1997, and he owns a home off Old Kings Road in Southside, though his wife and three children currently live in Bosnia, according to his lawsuit. Saleh said Bosnic visits his family overseas about twice a year.
Duval County has the sixth-largest Bosnian immigrant population in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Much of the area’s Bosnian population similarly lives on the Southside. More than 5 percent of the people in the Census tract where Bosnic owns a house are foreign-born residents from Bosnia.
Bosnic also works as a truck driver, and as a result of his placement on the watch list, he had his special ID card that gave him access to secure areas of JaxPort revoked.
Bosnic’s lawsuit against the federal government notes that he was never told why he was placed on the list, and it says he was never given a meaningful chance to contest the decision.
While the Department of Homeland Security allowed Bosnic to use its Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, that program has been found unconstitutionally ineffective in the past. The Department of Homeland Security has offered reforms to the redress process, but the new procedures have already faced challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the new process “still falls far short of constitutional requirements because it denies our clients meaningful notice, evidence, and a hearing.”
Ahilan Arulanantham, an ACLU attorney who worked on the lawsuit that found the old redress program ineffective, said that “the government stranding U.S. citizens abroad is illegal, and it’s wrong that the government has continued to engage in that practice.”
After he used the redress program, two FBI agents in Sarajevo asked Bosnic if he was a terrorist and what he did for a living. The agents told him they didn’t know why he wasn’t able to fly home, according to the lawsuit.
It wasn’t until May 24 that Bosnic got confirmation from the Department of Homeland Security that he was on the No Fly List. He was eventually given a one-time waiver, and on Wednesday, more than four-and-a-half months after he first tried, he was able to fly home.
But as a truck driver, he will have to give up about 30 percent of his routes, his lawyer said, because the TSA revoked his special ID card. His lawyer, Saleh, noted that Bosnic had not been arrested, charged or convicted of any terrorism-related offense.
“Our first goal is to get him off the list,” Saleh said. “We would hope to remain in communication with the federal government and work hand-in-hand with them to get some reform on how these lists are developed. We believe we can have a more efficient protocol for keeping this country safe.”