Stanford graduate student mistakenly put on no-fly list gets redemption

Rahinah Ibrahim Rahinah Ibrahim Photo: - / McManis Faulkner Law Photo: - / McManis Faulkner Law Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Stanford graduate student mistakenly put on no-fly list gets redemption 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

It has been nearly 14 years since Stanford graduate student Rahinah Ibrahim was prevented from returning from her native Malaysia to San Francisco because an FBI agent, by checking the wrong box, mistakenly put her on the “no-fly” list of suspected terrorists.

Ibrahim, now 53 and a professor of architecture in Malaysia, won some redemption Wednesday when a federal appeals court, in a stinging rebuke to three successive administrations, said the government must compensate Ibrahim’s lawyers for millions of dollars they spent on her case.

“Dr. Ibrahim was the first person ever to force the government to admit a terrorist watchlisting mistake,” the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in an 8-3 ruling.

Her victory “affected the way all individuals can contest their placements on these watchlists,” Judge Kim Wardlaw said in the majority opinion. Since a federal judge ruled that Ibrahim’s rights had been violated, Wardlaw noted, the government has allowed individuals to challenge their inclusion on the no-fly list.

The court told U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco to reconsider his decision to award only $400,000 in legal fees and costs to Ibrahim’s attorneys.

Alsup had ruled in 2014, after a trial that both Ibrahim and her U.S. citizen daughter were prevented from attending, that the government had wrongly placed her on the no-fly list. But he also found that she had been only partially successful in her legal challenges, and rejected her lawyers’ request for nearly $4 million in compensation.

The appeals court said the lawyers were entitled to the “vast majority” of those fees, and also told Alsup to decide whether the government had acted in bad faith — grounds for increased fees — by prolonging the case for years with “ethically questionable” conduct and baseless arguments, possibly because of Ibrahim’s Muslim faith. That conduct began under the George W. Bush administration, when the suit was filed, and has continued, Wardlaw said.

But while noting that the government’s lawyer had admitted in 2013 that Ibrahim “was not a threat to the national security of the United States and that she never has been,” the court did not end her continued exile. The Justice Department told Alsup after the trial that Ibrahim was being denied a visa because of secret evidence that remains undisclosed. That decision was not challenged in the current case.

“It’s been a nightmare, Kafka-esque,” said attorney James McManis of the San Jose firm McManis Faulkner, which represents Ibrahim. “We battled the government for 10 years,” he said, and won a series of rulings that “vindicated an innocent person’s right to fly.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The ruling was issued exactly 14 years after Ibrahim, while still a Stanford student, was arrested at San Francisco International Airport as she tried to board a plane with her 14-year-old daughter. Ibrahim, then in a wheelchair because of recent surgery, was held for two hours, then released and allowed to fly to a meeting to present her research, and from there to Malaysia.

But when she tried to return to the U.S. two months later, she was told that her visa had been revoked under a terrorism law. The case dragged on for years, with shifting government explanations about her exclusion. This is until the trial when an FBI agent — testifying in a courtroom that was closed to the public, at the government’s insistence — admitted he had mistakenly placed Ibrahim on the no-fly list in November 2004 after an investigation had cleared her.

Ibrahim settled claims against San Francisco police and others involved in her arrest for $225,000.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko