“The harm done to Arab American confidence in the census is immeasurable,” Helen Hatab Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation, wrote in a letter to Dr. Louis Kincannon, director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Samhan’s organization had worked closely in the past with Census Bureau officials to explain and help gather information on the Arab American community nationwide.

“Already victims of government policies that promote collective suspicion and feed backlash against them, our community sees this episode, regardless of the facts at hand, as one more reason to feel unprotected and unfairly targeted,” Samhan said. “As Census stakeholders, we also fear that if not appropriately dealt with, this incident could embolden critics of the Census and those who do not support the collection of socio-economic information about American society. This is, in our view, an unacceptable outcome. We believe that many data-sharing safeguards already in place can be strengthened to keep communities safe from official misuse.”

One set of data listed cities with more than 1,000 Arab Americans. The other, more detailed set, provided ZIP code breakdowns and sorted Arab Americans by county of origin. The categories were Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, “Arab/Arabic” and “Other Arab.”

Civil liberties request

The Census Bureau disclosed the data sharing in response to a request from Electronic Privacy Information Center, the civil liberties group that shared the documents with the New York Times, which first reported the story.

The information was compiled between August 2002 and December 2003, in response to requests from what is now the Customs and Border protection division of Homeland Security. A spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection told the New York Times the requests were made not for law enforcement purposes, but to help identify which airports to post signs and pamphlets in Arabic to assist travelers.

But critics said Customs could have gathered general demographic snapshots without such detailed data, and that the ancestral breakdown seemed excessive because Arabic or English could be used for all of the groups.

In 2000, the Census Bureau formally apologized for allowing its data to be used to assist in the locating of Japanese Americans for internment during World War II.

Kenneth Pruit, the former Census Bureau director who made the apology, told the Times that the bureau is cautious in its cooperation with law enforcement agencies.

“It is difficult to explain to the public,” he said. “There is an issue of principle involved as well as law. In World War II we violated our principles even if we didn’t violate the law, and we assured people we wouldn’t do it again.”

Samia El-Badry, a demographer who serves on the Decennial Census Advisory Committee, said the move by the Census Bureau was a betrayal and undermines the [Arab-American] community’s confidence in that organization.

“I’m outraged that the bureau did not tell me or the advisory committee of the request for two years, and only told me about it the day it came out in public,” she wrote in a letter to the director of the Census Bureau. “Representing the Arab-American community, I have been serving on the committee for the past eight years, both as an Arab American and as a demographer. I trusted and supported the bureau and really believed that the bureau would not do anything to betray public trust.”