On Thursday, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued an indefinite stay of an immigration judge's decision to release Mazen Al-Najjar on $8,000 bond. The former University of South Florida teacher has been in a Bradenton jail for the past 3 1/2 years on the basis of secret evidence of alleged terrorist activity.

Talk about a legal roller coaster. On Wednesday, Al-Najjar was nearly a free man. In a much-anticipated ruling, Immigration Judge R. Kevin McHugh ordered Al-Najjar released on bond since the government had failed to provide his defense team with a summary of the secret evidence sufficient to allow Al-Najjar to defend himself. But just hours before his scheduled release, the BIA canceled the homecoming with an emergency stay that it made indefinite the next day.

When House Minority Whip David Bonior, D-Mich., heard what happened, he was incredulous: "The judges have ruled there is no evidence against this man. I've been in this business for 30 years, and I've never seen an injustice like this." Bonior has been leading the effort in Congress to ban the use of secret evidence against immigrants, using Al-Najjar's case as a model of the fundamental unfairness being tolerated within our justice system. This newest twist only adds to the outrage.

Al-Najjar's wife Fedaa responded to the BIA order with a plaintive: "Why are they doing that? What do they want?"

Both good questions that deserve answers.

In the name of national security, the government has used secret evidence to jail about two dozen immigrants across the country on suspected terrorism charges, nearly all have been Arab and Muslim. And while it's disturbing enough that we have imprisoned people without telling them why, in many of these cases when the so-called classified information was finally released it has turned out to be little more than rumor, guilt by association, presumptions based on anti-Arab bias and charges from non-credible sources such as estranged spouses. Still, the Justice Department has insisted on using every legal avenue to keep these immigrants both in jail and in the dark as to the allegations against them.

Al-Najjar's attorneys have filed an emergency motion in federal court alleging his continued incarceration is unconstitutional. If the immigration courts, a branch of the Justice Department themselves, aren't willing to provide a semblance of justice, then it is up to the federal courts to do so.

Al-Najjar should have been freed last week. Every hour he remains locked up increases our national shame.

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