A Palestinian Arab store clerk living in the country illegally has filed a federal lawsuit claiming police notified immigration authorities after he complained that an NYPD officer harassed him.

Waheed Saleh, 35, said police turned him in to federal immigration authorities in retaliation for a complaint he filed in 2003 with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates alleged police misconduct.

While he and legal advocates said his case is about immigrants’ rights to city services and to file grievances against the government, some question whether an illegal immigrant should file a lawsuit.

“If you’re going to file a suit and you’re an illegal immigrant, then you’re taking a risk,” the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, Jim Copeland, said. “That sounds harsh … but it does strike me as quite odd that someone who is an illegal immigrant would file suit.”

At a press conference yesterday, Mr. Saleh said he “did the right thing” in filing the harassment complaint against the police officer. Mr. Saleh alleges Officer Kishon Hickman repeatedly singled him out by ticketing his car and on one occasion issuing a disorderly conduct citation for obstructing the sidewalk in front of a Bronx donut shop, where Mr. Saleh had been standing and smoking a cigarette.

Mr. Saleh said police made verbal threats for him to drop the complaint, and he said he was surprised when immigration authorities arrested him in December 2004 for being in the U.S. illegally.

A CCRB spokesman, Andrew Case, said the board investigated the harassment complaint and determined it to be unfounded.

The chief spokesman for the police department, Paul Brown, denied Mr. Saleh’s CCRB complaint was connected to his arrest by federal immigration authorities. “The NYPD does not report anyone based solely on their immigration status,” he said.

Mr. Saleh’s lawyer, Tushar Sheth, a staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the incident was a “direct violation” of a mayoral executive order that prohibits city employees from questioning or disclosing the immigration status of individuals who use city services or who witness or are victims to crime. “This case is about whether or not an immigrant can access a city service without fear of immigration consequences,” he said.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Heather McDonald, said reporting illegal immigrants is directly related to fighting terror, and therefore necessary at all costs. “The police should be able to use every darned rule to protect us against terrorists, and given that the majority of Al Qaeda terrorists are not U.S. citizens, it seems to me that it’s the absolute soundest principles for protecting the country against terrorism to inquire into immigration status.”