WASHINGTON (AP) — The Secret Service said Monday it has not allowed the Muslim mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, to attend a celebration at the White House to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Shortly before Mayor Mohamed Khairullah was scheduled to arrive at the White House for the end-of-fast celebration, the official received a call from the White House assuring him that he had not received access authorization from the Secret Service and could not attend the celebration in which Biden addressed hundreds of guests. Khairullah said the White House did not explain to him why the Secret Service denied him entry.
After being told he would not be able to enter the event, Khairullah, 47, reported the incident to the New Jersey office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The group has called on the Biden administration to end the FBI’s dissemination of information from what is known as a terrorist investigation database that includes hundreds of thousands of individuals. The group informed Khairullah that a person with the same name and date of birth was among the data CAIR obtained in 2019.
Khairullah was an outspoken critic of the travel restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump, which limited entry into the country to citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries. He has also traveled to Bangladesh and Syria to do humanitarian work with the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation.
“It left me baffled, surprised and disappointed,” Khairullah said in a telephone interview as he returned to New Jersey on Monday afternoon. “It is not a matter of not having entered the party. It’s the reason I didn’t go in. And it is a list that has attacked me because of my identity. And I don’t think the highest ranking office in the United States should engage in this kind of discrimination.”
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairullah was not allowed into the White House complex, but declined to disclose the reason. Khairullah was elected to a fifth term as the town’s mayor last January.
“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed into the White House complex this morning,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “Unfortunately we are unable to comment further on the specific motives and protective methods used to conduct our White House security operations.”
The White House declined to comment.
Selaedin Maksut, executive director of CAIR’s New Jersey chapter, called the move “totally unacceptable and insulting.”
“If these types of incidents happen to well-known and highly respected Muslim American figures like Mayor Khairullah, it begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who don’t have the access and visibility that the mayor has?” Maksut questioned.
On a previous occasion, Khairullah said he was detained by authorities in 2019 and questioned at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for three hours, and asked if he knew any terrorists. The incident happened when he was returning to the United States after a family visit to Turkey, where his wife has family.
Khairullah was born in Syria, but his family was displaced amid the repressive measures of the Hafez al-Assad government in the early 1980s. His family fled to Saudi Arabia before moving to Prospect Park in 1991. They have lived there ever since. .
In 2000 he obtained US citizenship and in 2001 he was elected for the first time as mayor of the city. He also worked 14 years as a volunteer firefighter in his community.