MOORE HAVEN, Fla. — Youssef Samir Megahed toyed with a piece of lint on the other side of the bulletproof glass and described his case as simply “weird.”

In April, a federal jury acquitted him on charges of transporting explosives during a road trip with a friend who had packed model rocket propellants in the trunk. But three days later, in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Tampa, Mr. Megahed was arrested again in connection with the case, this time by immigration authorities.

The new charge is that he “is engaged in or is likely to engage in” terrorist activities, a violation of his legal residency in the United States.

“They just label you a terrorist and that’s it,” said Mr. Megahed, 23, who moved to Florida from Egypt with his family 11 years ago and is being held here at an immigration detention center.

Mr. Megahed is at least the third Florida defendant in three years to be brought up on immigration charges after prosecutors failed to win terrorism convictions in federal court. If convicted of the new charges and deported, he would join thousands of other Muslim and Arab men sent home since Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an extensive law enforcement strategy that relies on the immigration courts to remove potential threats.

Some national security experts say the country is safer without such men, and immigration officials declare the deportations both legal and fair. But with President Obama scheduled to speak in Cairo on Thursday about repairing relations with the Muslim world, Mr. Megahed is being presented by critics of the immigration strategy here and abroad as a test case of the president’s pledge to break with some of the Bush administration’s most unpopular policies.

Egyptian news outlets and blogs have taken up Mr. Megahed’s cause. Several federal jurors who acquitted him have also made the rare move of publicizing their outrage at their verdict’s being second-guessed, while Arab-American groups, civil rights organizations and churches have lobbied the Obama administration for his release.

“We are sending the wrong message to American Muslims and the Muslim world,” said Ramzy Kiliç, executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for Muslims. “If Obama really wants to make a new way forward with mutual respect, he has to start here at home.”

Immigration courts have not been central to the prosecution of cases involving terrorism. But in such cases, they share prosecutorial advantages similar to those found in the controversial military tribunals for suspects accused of being foreign fighters.

In immigration courts, for example, hearings can be closed to the public, the burden of proof is lower than in federal court, and a wider scope of evidence, including hearsay, can be used. Michael Wishnie, a law professor at Yale University, said using immigration courts in these cases amounted to “second-class justice” because “the defendant’s rights are reduced.”

In Mr. Megahed’s case, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have emphasized that his deportation hearing is a civil, not a criminal, proceeding, possibly with new evidence, and does not amount to “double jeopardy” — the prohibition on trying defendants more than once for the same crime.

“This is nothing new,” said Bill West, chief of national security for immigration enforcement until he retired in 2003. “The concept goes back to Al Capone — get the bad guys any way you can, on any violation you can.”

Still, the main question in the immigration case is essentially the same as it was in the federal trial: Is Mr. Megahed a danger to society, or, as his lawyer argues, is he only “guilty of having stupid friends”?

Mr. Megahed’s legal problems began two years ago on a road trip with Ahmed Mohamed, who, like Mr. Megahed, was Egyptian, Muslim and an engineering student at the University of South Florida. Mr. Megahed said he had known Mr. Mohamed for only a few months before traveling with him in the summer of 2007.

“It was for fun,” Mr. Megahed said in an interview here. “To see the Southeast of the United States.”

They took turns driving north until they reached Goose Creek, S.C., where the police pulled them over for going 60 miles an hour in a 45-m.p.h. zone. One of two deputies involved said he had become suspicious when the men quickly put away a laptop; a recording of the traffic stop captured the officer saying, “I think they’re part of the Taliban.”

The officers searched the trunk and found “several pipe bombs;” more specifically, four pieces of PVC tubing, about 2 to 2.5 inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter, which contained sugar, potassium nitrate and cat litter.

Mr. Mohamed told the police they were homemade fireworks — similar recipes can be found online. The authorities charged them with possession of an explosive device, carrying a prison term of up to 15 years. A judge set bail at $500,000 for Mr. Mohamed and $300,000 for Mr. Megahed.

“That is when the bad dreams began,” Mr. Megahed’s father, Samir, an engineer, said in an interview with his wife, Ahlem, at their upscale two-story town house in Tampa. Declaring “I love America,” he said he had brought his family to the state because the University of South Florida had accepted his two sons.

He described Youssef, the younger, as an outgoing joker who had lost a front tooth rough-housing as a boy.

Mr. Megahed, in a visitation booth at the detention center, described himself as clueless. He said he had not known the plastic tubes were in the trunk (his fingerprints were not found on them) and had never even heard the term “pipe bomb” until the police said it.

He also said he had not known they were seven miles from a naval base when they were pulled over, or that Mr. Mohamed’s laptop had a video on it showing a rocket attack somewhere in the Middle East.

“I thought it was going to be O.K.,” Mr. Megahed said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

After their arrest, federal investigators found a YouTube video that Mr. Mohamed had made showing how to turn a toy into a detonator. In December, Mr. Mohamed pleaded guilty in a separate case to providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to 15 years in prison; as part of the plea agreement, the charges from the traffic stop were dropped.

Mr. Megahed was not involved with the video. His trial began three months later and lasted three weeks. Gary Meringer, the jury foreman, said jurors were initially suspicious about the circumstantial evidence in the case — the fireworks in the trunk; the video on the laptop; a gas can in the car; that they had tried to buy a gun, while their bags lacked toothpaste or bathing suits.

An initial survey of jurors, Mr. Meringer said, produced six guilty votes, four undecided, and two not guilty. But as the jury examined each detail individually, he said, holes emerged. For example, the prosecutor’s expert could not get a simulated version of the alleged explosives to give off much more than heat and smoke.

It was also unclear whether Mr. Megahed had watched the video on the laptop, or if he had viewed a handful of Web sites — on AK-47s among other things — that were found in the browsing history on a family computer at the Megaheds’ home.

By the third day of deliberations, the jury had arrived at unanimous verdicts of not guilty of transporting explosive materials and of possessing a destructive device.

Mr. Megahed’s sister cried in the courtroom. He celebrated at the beach. Then immigration authorities arrested Mr. Megahed after a shopping trip with his father. Mr. Meringer, 57, the foreman, who is a corporate lawyer, was shocked when he heard of the immigration charge. “It literally took the air right out of my chest,” he said. “I felt the government had completely wasted the time of the legal system, the judge, the jury, the bailiffs, all of those people.”

He contacted the other jurors, and three joined him in signing a statement opposing Mr. Megahed’s detention. “We want a fair shake,” Mr. Meringer said. “A fair shake for Youssef would be that he could finish college, become a citizen and go on his merry way.”

Mr. Megahed’s hearing is scheduled for Aug. 17. By then, he will have spent nearly a year behind bars, including nine months before his trial.

His lawyer, Charles Kuck, said immigration officials had suggested they would rely in part on evidence from the family computer, which Mr. Megahed’s brother, Yahia, said had been used by numerous friends and relatives.

In the criminal trial, the judge excluded eight video clips on the computer that show rocket attacks in an unidentified Middle Eastern location; a ninth clip shows an improvised explosive device that hits an American tank.

While Mr. Megahed waits, his parents visit him every five days, as often as is allowed. His father said he worried that his son had become depressed. “Every time he tells me to bring clothes for him in case they let him out,” he said.

But in the interview, Mr. Megahed seemed determined to appear stoic. He said he had turned to an Arabic proverb for solace: “The longer you live, the more you will see.”

Lynn Waddell contributed reporting from Tampa, Fla.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/04terror.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

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