If you have no Green Card and you are in the US (or in its way, in another country - friendly to the US or not), you should have realised by now that since September 11 - you have no rights whatsoever.

That is correct. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service is a monument of inefficiency, and I can guarantee you that a significant percentage of the people who were jailed had done everything right with respect to their paperwork, and just had gotten lost in the red tape. The INS's screwups leading up to 9/11 are well-documented, and now instead of cleaning up their act, making things more efficient and stringent, they're just rounding up anyone who "fits the description" and locking them up until they can be sorted out.

Basically, because they can't account for the real terrorists, they're grabbing anyone they can. When we all know that the REAL terrorists aren't the ones that are going to get caught in something like this.