1. The federal government has imposed a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs. Without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes — the agency defendants act in concert to deprive thousands of innocent Americans, mostly Muslim, of their right to be free from a government that extrajudicially designates them as worthy of permanent suspicion.

2. That permanent suspicion has sweeping consequences for the Plaintiffs as well as the more than one million others who bear it. They are separated from their children, denied employment opportunities, prevented from traveling by air to attend weddings and funerals, and denied or delayed immigration benefits. The rights of Plaintiffs to purchase firearms, to wire money and keep a bank account, to receive their passports and be granted visas to foreign countries are all constrained. For one plaintiff, the Defendants’ actions have diminished his standing and ability to provide religious leadership to his community.

3. Through an interagency watchlisting system, led by Defendants’ Watchlisting Advisory Council, the Defendants have identified the Plaintiffs as worthy of permanent suspicion, imposing burdens and disabilities on them in all aspects of their lives.

4. In deciding to target the Plaintiffs, the watchlisting system behaves lawlessly, acting in the absence of and — in some ways — in opposition to what Congress requires of its agencies.

5. To identify its targets, some parts of the watchlisting system, such as the Terrorism Screening Database (“TSDB”), utilize a nonsense-on-stilts standard that is always satisfied. Other parts, such as TSA’s Quiet Skies initiative, do not use any standard and instead rely upon the inarticulate hunches of federal officials, rank profiling, and vulgar guilt-by-association practices.

6. Through their watchlisting system, the federal government makes it known — to every law enforcement agency in the country, every part of the federal government, more than 60 foreign countries, an unknown number of private companies, international bodies, and other third parties—that the Plaintiffs should be treated as dangerous threats. The Plaintiffs’ friends, family, and others with whom the Plaintiffs associate are punished for their relationship with a watchlisting system’s target.

So begins the complaint filed earlier this month in Federal court in Maryland in the broadest legal challenge to date to the US government’s sweeping program of extrajudicial blacklisting and restriction of the rights of US (and foreign) citizens.

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