"Things like that don't happen here".

Early on November 7, a dozen armed U.S. Customs agents swooped into a working class neighborhood of Seattle and seized the assets of four small businesses and proceeded to padlock their doors.

"We were trying to open our own tiny mall, and all of a sudden this big hammer came and took everything in sight," says Abdinasir Nur, owner of the Maka Mini Market and Halal Meats.

Nur, who drove a cab sixteen hours a day for five years to start his business, sublets his office space to two other companies. Abdinasir Farah runs a gift shop called Amana there. Nur also sublets to Barakat Wire Transfer. And that appears to be the one the Customs agents were interested in. They took in for questioning the owners of Barakat, Hassan Mus Farah and Mohamed Osman, and released them a few hours later.

A common name for a Somali business, Barakat, with various English spellings, means "blessing." But Al-Barakaat is one of two major international consortiums which the U.S. government says are skimming money for Al Qaeda. Farah says his wire transfer business, Barakat, has no relationship to Al-Barakaat.

Farah and Osman's services are widely used by community members, who send sums as low as $20 and often not more than $100 to relatives in Somalia. But these customers are now out of luck. President Bush's Executive Order 13224, signed on September 23, allows the government to freeze the assets of presumed money-launderers and businesses believed to skim a percentage off the top of transactions for Al Qaeda. Federal authorities estimate that some $25 million laundered from wire transfers to Somalia may have been used to support terrorism. Since September 11, $60 million has been seized or blocked, $27 million of that in the United States.

The same day that agents raided Barakat, Customs cracked down on other wire transfer companies in Boston, Minneapolis, and Columbus, Ohio. Raids also occurred in European countries, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Wire transfer services, or hawalas, enable U.S. residents to send money, for a fee of as little as 5 percent, to recipients in other countries, especially where there are no banks or reliable financial services. Without the remittances that often come on a monthly basis, whole families could perish. The United Nations estimates that Somalia receives about $500 million annually in remittances, a sum greater than that from any other economic sector, and "ten times the amount of foreign aid it receives," according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The hawala system relies on personal trust. That is one reason culturally familiar, neighborhood services are favored by the immigrant community to transfer money to relatives rather than banks. They also tend to be fairly inexpensive and simple to use. When you want to send $50 to your grandfather in a village near Mogadishu, you go to your neighborhood hawaladar and hand him cash. He calls, e-mails, or faxes his contact in the village, and his connection gives that amount to your recipient. No money is actually sent until the accounts are balanced at international banks. In the case of Seattle's Barakat Wire Transfer, the settlement money goes through the local Bank of America, to the New York head office, and then to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which, according to Rob Nichols, a Treasury Department spokesman, is where "the bad guys" at Al-Barakaat skim an estimated 5 percent for Al Qaeda. (So far, there has been no announcement of a raid on Bank of America.)

Nichols says the customers who have used the Barakat remittance are not under investigation. However, the money transfer service and the three other shops housed within the minimarket are still being investigated. "We can't even pay for a parking lot," says Nur. "How could we send money to terrorists?"

Nichols says whether the owner is aware of it or not, Seattle's Barakat business is a part of the terrorist system. Osman "denied that he, his partner Mustafa Farah, or Barakat Wire Transfer are linked to terrorist networks," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

On the day of the raids, as Customs agents were still loading trucks with lettuce, computers, and display cases, more than 200 Somalis and other members of the community came out to protest. A week later, another rally took place. "We came here because things like that don't happen here," said Asha, a Somali woman who spoke there.

Eventually, the Treasury Department agreed to release the seized property of the meat, gift, and grocery stores. Perishable items were sent to the dump. And Nur had to retrieve the rest of the property at his own expense. He had to rent a huge truck, insure the driver, and pay for the labor necessary to get the goods out of storage in a nearby city.

On November 28, the truck stood outside the door of the Maka Mini Market, waiting to be unloaded.

Barakat Wire Transfer, however, is in a more precarious situation. Because the owners have not been charged, they cannot benefit from a speedy trial to clear their names. The investigation could take years, so the Barakat assets may be under lock and key--and the business moribund--indefinitely. If the owners are innocent, why have their assets been seized? And if there is evidence they have committed a crime, why have they not been arrested? The Fifth Amendment clearly states, "No person ... shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

Nur and Abdinasir Farah fear they will never recoup their losses, which occurred just before Ramadan, a time of extra business.

Meanwhile, proprietors of wire transfer companies around the country owe customers in the United States and Somalia thousands of dollars in remittance money taken by the Treasury Department.

Ginny NiCarthy, a political activist, is the author of "Getting Free: You Can End Abuse and Take Back Your Life" (Seal Press, 1997).