PROSPECT PARK, N.J. - Prospect Park, New Jersey Mayor Mohamed Khairullah said he was not allowed to attend a celebration with President Joe Biden at the White House to belatedly mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Mayor Khairullah is now calling for the administration to end the federal "watch list" he said illegally targets Muslims and others."I have no reason to believe I am an unsafe person to any elected official," Khairullah said.During a news conference held Tuesday in South Plainfield by the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ), Mayor Khairullah and several other speakers condemned the list as illegal, discriminatory and unconstitutional."Our crimes are our names, ethnicities and religion," Khairullah said. "I call on President Biden to correct the injustices of the previous administrations by disbanding this secret list ill-advised racist policies." They also called on the U.S.
Secret Service and other federal agencies to stop using and distributing the list, which the group says has more than 1.5 million names, a majority of which are "Arab or Muslim sounding."At the Eid-Al-Fitr event Monday, President Biden said "we are determined to combat all forms of hate including Islamophobia which is important to me.
It's a priority for my administration." CAIR has called on the Biden administration to cease the FBI’s dissemination of information from what is known as a Terrorist Screening Data Set that includes hundreds of thousands of individuals.