Muslim mayor blocked from White House event calls for end to terror watch list

Islamic civil rights groups from across New Jersey called on the Biden administration to discontinue the use of terror watch lists after the state’s longest-serving Muslim official accused the White House of racially profiling him on Monday.

The Secret Service confirmed Monday that it abruptly disinvited Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah from attending the White House’s celebration of Islamic holiday Eid-al-Fitr. While the agency declined to comment on its specific methods for determining eligibility to visit the White House, Khairullah and other advocates believe his unexplained presence on the secret government watch list is to blame.

The move by the Secret Service — Khairullah said he was disinvited by phone just minutes before his arrival at the White House — has angered Islamic activists who are now calling for an apology from President Joe Biden and a new invitation for Khairullah to visit the president.

The mayor and others spoke about the episode at a press conference Tuesday hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“When I first ran for office in 2001, just one year after I became a naturalized citizen, I was hopeful that I could help implement systematic changes within New Jersey that would make life better for American Muslims,” Khairullah said. “Incidents like this — being flagged on a watch list and denied the honor that every leader should be given — make me question our progress.”

Khairullah’s name appears on a watch list — what the FBI calls a “terrorist screening dataset” — obtained by CAIR’s lawyers in 2019. CAIR says the list, which contains information on 1.5 million people, is primarily filled with Islamic, Arab, and South Asian names.

“Islamophobia is a top-down problem in our nation,” said Selaedin Maksut, CAIR New Jersey’s executive director. “As long as the United States government treats Muslims with suspicion and discrimination, so will our neighbors.”

Khairullah was first elected to the council of Prospect Park, a borough of 6,400 in Passaic County, in 2001. He became its mayor in 2005 after a campaign that saw an anonymous flier distributed to voters accusing him of ties to terrorists, an allegation he called baseless and disgusting.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) echoed CAIR’s protests on Tuesday, saying in a statement that Khairullah and his constituents deserve an explanation for disinviting Khairullah.

“Mayor Khairullah represents the best of our American story and the power of a diverse nation bonded by common ideals,” Booker said. “Those ideals include truth and transparency. I believe excluding him was the wrong decision.”

Khairullah said Monday’s snub was not the first time he has been treated with suspicion by federal officials. In 2019, he was detained at an airport, where he said officials confiscated his cell phone.

Khairullah most recently visited Syria, his country of origin, in 2015. He said he had no trouble traveling until 2019, the same year his name was reported on the watch list.

“At this point, our crimes are our names, ethnicities, and religion,” Khairullah said.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday deferred questions about the matter to the Secret Service.

“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not permitted to enter the White House complex for this evening’s event,” Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s chief of communications, said in a statement to NBC News.

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story misidentified Prospect Park’s county.