The Secret Service blocked a Muslim mayor from New Jersey from attending a celebration at the White House on Monday that belatedly marked the end of Ramadan.
Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah (D) said he was told that he was not cleared by the Secret Service to attend the Eid al-Fitr celebration that marked the end of the Muslim holy month. The news came while he was on his way to the White House.
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“It’s disappointing, and it’s shocking that this continues to happen under our Constitution which provides that everyone is innocent unless proven guilty,” Khairullah told NorthJersey.com.
“I honestly don’t know what my charge, if you want to put it that way, is at this point, to be treated in such a manner.”
Khairullah told the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations about the rejection and was told that someone with his name and date of birth appeared on an FBI Terrorist Screening Data Set, which the council's attorneys obtained in 2019. The set includes the names of hundreds of thousands of people.
“It left me baffled, shocked and disappointed,” Khairullah told the Associated Press. “It’s not a matter of I didn’t get to go to a party. It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity. And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.”
The Secret Service confirmed the incident but did not provide additional information on the reasoning.
“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed to enter the White House complex this evening,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement. “Unfortunately we are not able to comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.”
Khairullah said Monday was not the first time he had been profiled. The mayor claimed he was stopped by authorities at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in 2019 after he returned from visiting his wife's family in Turkey. Khairullah said he was detained and interrogated for three hours about whether he knew any terrorists.
He was also briefly stopped at the U.S.-Canada border when crossing back into the United States with his family, Khairullah said.
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Khairullah, who was born in Syria but moved to the U.S. with his family in 1991, became a legal U.S. citizen in 2000. He was later elected as the mayor of Prospect Park in 2005, and he has served as its mayor ever since.
Khairulllah was invited to the White House for the Muslim celebration after helping the New Jersey Democratic Party compile a list of Muslim leaders in the state to also invite to the event. He most recently attended a separate affair at the governor's mansion over the weekend, according to CAIR. The White House event included a speech by President Joe Biden.