Drawing comparisons to the Red Scare that stretched from the late 1940s to the ’50s, a federal appeals court on Tuesdayreinstated a civil rights lawsuit that had challenged wide-ranging surveillance by the New York Police Department of Muslim communities in New Jersey.
The Police Department, in an effort after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, sent plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods in New York City and elsewhere, infiltrated Muslim student groups and mosques, tracked the activities of Muslims and built files on people.
But the lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Newark by a group of individuals, businesses, student associations and mosques, claimed that the police surveillance illegally targeted them on the grounds that they were Muslim and that their religious identity was a “permissible proxy for criminality.”
A judge dismissed the lawsuit last year, but a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which is based in Philadelphia and hears appeals from New Jersey, said the plaintiffs had “plausibly alleged that the city engaged in intentional discrimination.”
