This Way There Won’t Be Anyone Around To Make A Fuss

And this way there won’t be any unseemly reminder of what happened:

The parents and sister of a man convicted of conspiring to bomb the Herald Square subway station were detained yesterday by federal immigration authorities, who have been seeking to deport them to Pakistan.

The arrests came a day after the convicted man, Shahawar Matin Siraj, 24, was sentenced in United States District Court in Brooklyn to 30 years in prison.

The family, who came to the United States in 1999, had been seeking asylum since 2003, citing religious persecution in their home country.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Mr. Siraj’s father, Siraj Abdul Rehman, 54, was arrested because a final deportation order had been filed against him. But a lawyer for the family said his case was still under appeal.

The agency spokesman, Mark Thorn, said that the man’s mother, Shahina Parveen, 50, and his sister, Sanya Siraj, 19, were arrested and detained on immigration violations.

. . .

The lawyer for the family, Mona Shah, disputed that a final order of removal had been entered against Mr. Rehman. She said he still has an appeal pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“It’s absolutely disgusting that they’ve picked him up under the guise of a deportation order,” Ms. Shah said yesterday. “Fine, punish the son. But why punish them like this?”

She could not offer an explanation for the timing of the move, but suggested that it might stem from pressure on the authorities because the family’s immigration status was cited in news reports about Mr. Siraj’s case.

Earlier: Just Imagine How Long We Could Have Put Him Away For Had He Actually Come Up With The Idea On His Own.