The US Secret Service stated Monday that it barred a Muslim mayor from Prospect Park, New Jersey, from attending a White House party with President Joe Biden to honor the conclusion of Ramadan.
Shortly before he was scheduled to arrive at the White House for the Eid-al-Fitr celebration, Mayor Mohamed Khairullah said he received a call from the White House informing him that he had not been cleared for entry by the Secret Service and would therefore be unable to attend the event at which Biden delivered remarks to hundreds of guests. He claimed that the White House representative failed to explain why the Secret Service had denied him admission.
Khairullah, 47, notified the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after being denied entry to the event.
The group has asked the Biden administration to stop the FBI from disseminating information from a Terrorist Screening Data Set, which comprises hundreds of thousands of people. The group told Khairullah that a person with his name and birthdate was included in a dataset collected by CAIR attorneys in 2019.
New Jersey mayor denied entry to White House due to undisclosed security concerns
Khairullah was a vocal opponent of former President Donald Trump‘s travel ban, which barred citizens of many primarily Muslim nations from entering the United States. He has also traveled to Bangladesh and Syria to assist the Syrian American Medical Society and the WatanFoundation with humanitarian efforts.
“It left me baffled, shocked, and disappointed,” Khairullah said in a telephone interview as he made his way home to New Jersey on Monday evening. “It’s not a matter of I didn’t get to go to a party. It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity. And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.”
Khairullah was not allowed into the White House complex, according to US Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, who declined to elaborate. Khairullah was elected to a fifth term as mayor of the municipality in January.
“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed to enter the White House complex this evening,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “Unfortunately we are not able to comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”
The White House did not respond
The executive director of CAIR’s New Jersey chapter, Selaedin Maksut, termed the decision “wholly unacceptable and insulting.”
“If these such incidents are happening to high-profile and well-respected American-Muslim figures like Mayor Khairullah, this then begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who do not have the access and visibility that the mayor has?” Maksut said.
Khairullah claimed he was detained by officials in 2019 and grilled for three hours at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport about whether he knew any terrorists. The event occurred when he was returning to the United States from a family trip to Turkey, where his wife’s family lives.
On another occasion, he stated that he was temporarily detained at the US-Canada border as he traveled back into the country with his family.
According to the group, Khairullah assisted the Democratic Party in compiling a list of local Muslim leaders to invite to the White House Eid celebration and was a guest at an event in the New Jersey governor’s home over the weekend.
Khairullah’s Background and Humanitarian Work in Syria
Khairullah was born in Syria, but his family was forced to flee during Hafez al-Assad’s government’s crackdowns in the early 1980s. Before relocating to Prospect Park in 1991, his family migrated to Saudi Arabia. He’s been there ever since.
He became a citizen of the United States in 2000 and was elected mayor for the first time in 2001. He also volunteered as a firefighter in his neighborhood for 14 years.
Khairullah stated that he conducted seven humanitarian aid organizations in Syria between 2012 and 2015 as a civil war ravaged much of the country.
“I am Syrian and you know it was very difficult to see what we saw on TV and and social media, and not respond to help people,” he said. “I mean we felt very helpless.”