Andre Aniba acknowledges he hasn’t always played by the rules. In 1998, the former pastry chef came to the United States from Tunisia on a three-month tourist visa. He has lived here ever since.

But when Congress passed legislation two years later that allowed illegal immigrants to apply for permanent residency, Aniba quickly sent in the proper forms. Early this year, when the government called on visitors from 25 nations that are considered havens for terrorists to register with immigration authorities, he dutifully appeared.

To his horror, Aniba, whose application to work as a chef at a Maryland restaurant was pending, was told he would be deported.

His experience wasn’t exceptional. With little public notice outside immigrant communities, the government is moving to deport the largest number of visitors from Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries in U.S. history — more than 13,000 of the nearly 83,000 men older than 16 who complied with the registration program by various deadlines between last September and April.

When they showed up, they were found in violation of immigration laws — even though, like Aniba, many were already participating in the government-sponsored program to become legal residents.

“The sheer numbers are mind-boggling,” said Sohail Mohammed, an attorney in Clifton, N.J., who handles many of the cases and says Muslims are being unfairly singled out in the tightening of immigration procedures after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “We could end up deporting almost as many Muslims in one year as we have in the last 10. And to me that shows that we’re not administering our immigration laws fairly.”

Middle Easterners still make up a very small percentage of the 150,000 to 180,000 foreign nationals deported annually; the overwhelming majority are Mexican. Yet even if many of the 13,000 men facing deportation proceedings persuade judges not to expel them, government officials agree that the number of Middle Eastern and Muslim men forced to leave probably will dwarf totals from previous years.

Muslims targeted

Deportations of people from the same Middle Eastern and largely Muslim countries totaled about 1,300 annually in recent years. They reached about 2,800 in the year after the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 25 nations on the list are Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia, and one non-Muslim nation, North Korea.

The dramatic rise in deportations is a side effect, not an objective, of the registration program, said Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

“The goal was to register individuals from these particular countries…. I don’t know that anyone expected that we would have that many visitors who were here unlawfully,” he said.

A new system

Strassberger described the program as the first step in establishing a new entry and exit system under which all visitors to the United States eventually will be required to register. He said visitors from the 25 countries covered in the initial stages of the program are considered “higher risk” because people from those countries have been linked to terrorists.

“Since 9-11, the country is at a higher alert,” he said. “We have to take extra precautions, and that would include monitoring the arrival, departures and travels of individuals from countries that have an active terrorist organization presence that poses a threat to us.”

But Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the policy “is being used as almost a deportation trap. I think it’s causing a lot of fear and apprehension. It creates a sense of being besieged.”