The Bush administration is attempting to use the Patriot Act to deport two Palestinian Americans for their actions 16 years ago when as students they allegedly raised money for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 1987 The Reagan administration attempted to bar the two men, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, and six others on the grounds that they were connected to a communist group. The men became known as the L.A. 8. They were never deported because a federal appeals court declared the anti-communist law to be unconstitutional. The Washington Post reports that at the time FBI Director William Webster conceded the men would never have been arrested if they were U.S. citizens and he concluded they never took part in terrorist activity.

But now the Washington Post reports the Bush administration is claiming the men broke the Patriot Act of 2001 which retroactively made it a crime to supply material support for organizations the government deems to be “terrorist.” Their attorney David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law said “This has always been a case of guilt by association, and nothing more.”