This Imam Refused to Be an FBI Informant. Now ICE Wants to Deport Him.

I first wrote about Farahi’s case in 2009, when it was one of the earliest public examples of the FBI using immigration to recruit Muslim informants. At the time, the FBI denied the practice outright. As other journalists uncovered similar cases, the FBI continued to deny.

Farahi’s fight with the government began in November 2004. As he walked home from evening prayers in North Miami Beach, he saw two men waiting outside his apartment. They introduced themselves as FBI agents.

The country was still in the grip of post-9/11 panic, and the agents wanted information about two men who had attended Farahi’s mosque: José Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber” accused of plotting to set off a crude radioactive device, and Adnan El Shukrijumah, a Saudi national who became a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda after leaving the U.S.

Farahi said he’d talk, but only in the open. He wanted his congregation to know why he was speaking to the FBI. The federal agents wanted something very different: secrecy. “I can’t,” he told them. To him, becoming an informant would have meant betraying his faith community. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” Farahi said to me years ago, when I first asked him about his encounter with the FBI. “That’s where the problem is.”

Years later, FBI agent Terry Albury leaked internal documents to The Intercept, confirming what Farahi’s case had suggested: using immigration as leverage wasn’t a rogue practice, but rather had been codified in the pages of the FBI’s internal policy manuals.

FBI agents were even tasked under official policy with helping deport informants who were “no longer suitable for use” — an acknowledgment that the policy goal wasn’t transactional so much as coercive.