WAR ON TERROR/WAR ON MUSLIMS:
POST-9/11 STATE-SPONSORED ISLAMOPHOBIA
Introduction
“Structural Islamophobia . . . is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of government institutions and actors. This fear and suspicion are manifested and enforced through the enactment and advancement of laws, policy, and programming built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat. These laws, policies, and programs may be explicitly discriminatory, like the first and second Muslim bans, which explicitly restricted immigrants from Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Others may seem neutral, having been framed in generally applicable terms, when in practice they are disproportionately enforced against Muslim subjects and communities.
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“Following 9/11, law scholar Leti Volpp observed how terror attacks involving a Muslim culprit spur the immediate “redeployment of Orientalist tropes.” These tropes are embedded within popular representations of Muslims, such as news coverage or depictions in film. But more saliently, they are embedded within the institutional memory of government agencies, including the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive branch—most notably, in the Department of Homeland Security and anti-terror law enforcement during the protracted war on terror. These foundational stereotypes, which portray Islam as irreconcilable with American values and society and Muslim identity as foreign, subversive, and harboring an inherent propensity for terrorism, move state agencies to enact policies that profile and closely police Muslim citizens and immigrants. Such policies assign the presumption of guilt to Muslims at large, and in turn diminish the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear)
This handout includes the following examples of state-sponsored Islamophobia:
We include in the entries that follow information about particular policies, programs, or actions, as well as some context for understanding them, including their impact on different Muslim communities. We are deeply appreciative for the work of the many people, largely from Muslim and other impacted communities, whom we quote—activists and advocates, academics and investigative journalists.
Anti-Sharia Campaign
“Sharia, or Islamic law, is, according to Abed Awad, a complex system of moral codes that governs all aspects of Muslim life”—similar to the ways in which Christian and Jewish religious laws guide adherents of those religions. Anti-Muslim ideologues from hate groups like ACT for America view Islam as a totalitarian doctrine (not a religion) that is attempting to take over the U.S. legal system, subjugate non-Muslims, and end the “American way of life.” The Southern Poverty Law Center describes these view as “one of the most successful far-right conspiracies to achieve mainstream viability.”
ACT and other groups have taken the lead in pushing anti-Sharia (or “anti-foreign” law) bills through state legislatures. As of February 2018, 14 states have banned “Sharia law,” while, since 2010, more than 200 have considered such bans, which forbid judges from consulting Sharia or foreign law. Even when the bills fail, their proponents manage to use their introduction as a way to whip up anti-Muslim “mass hysteria.”
A 2018 Trump poll of his supporters asks, “Are you concerned by the potential spread of Sharia Law?” Such prominent Trump administration figures as National Security Advisor John Bolton, senior political advisor Stephen Miller (advocate of the Muslim Bans), former CIA Director and nominee for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are strongly opposed to Sharia law, which the ACLU has called a non-existent threat to the U.S. judicial system.
Community Surveillance
“The New York City Police Department (NYPD) surveillance program has targeted Muslim, Arab American, and South Asian communities based on religion and ethnicity, not because of indicators of criminal activity. A 2011-2012 series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press (AP) articles found that the NYPD had infiltrated about 250 New York mosques, targeted people (including Coptic Christian Egyptians and Iranian Jews) because they “look Muslim,” and monitored Muslim students in several Northeast states just because of their religion (documenting, for example, how often Muslim college students on a rafting trip prayed). As a 2013 AP article reports, the NYPD has also designated mosques as “terror organizations,” placed informants in mosques, infiltrated at least one local Arab-American community organization, and videotaped and infiltrated the wedding of a young Muslim leader. The mayor and his police commissioner consistently stood firm behind this program, which, according to a NYPD commanding officer in 2012, had “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation. . .” (Along with the Muslim surveillance program, the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” program—targeting Black and Latinx young people—put Black and Latinx Muslims in the crosshairs of the NYPD for both their religion and their race/ethnicity.)
“[The] experiences [of CLEAR clients, Muslim individuals and organizations] show us that the NYPD’s tactics are not exceptional. Aggressively intrusive and harmful intelligence gathering on Muslims’ daily lives is a national epidemic—and the chief culprit is the FBI.
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“On a daily basis, our clients are targeted by FBI agents inquiring into the most intimate and protected areas of their lives. They are approached at night at their homes, stopped in front of their neighbors or children, solicited outside their subway stops or interrogated at their workplaces in front of their colleagues and customers.
“And the interrogations are far from voluntary. FBI agents regularly warn our clients who invoke their right to have an attorney present that ‘they can do this the easy way or the hard way.’
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“. . . an agent may conduct an ‘assessment’—the lowest level of investigation—without needing any approval, or showing any ‘factual predication’ of wrongdoing. Simply put, suspicion of criminal or terrorist activity is not needed to interrogate individuals or send informants into mosques, neighborhoods or organizations.” (Diala Shamas, “Where’s the Outrage When the FBI Targets Muslims?”)
“These programs both have their origins in what is popularly hailed as the ‘radicalization theory’ of terrorism. This theory emerged around 2004 on both sides of the Atlantic as Western governments worked to frame the terrorist threat as a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and to develop a preventive approach to counterterrorism. Radicalization theory posits a predictable correlation between increased religiosity and politicization among Muslims and the potential for terrorism. That is, as Muslims become more “radical”—by observing religious tradition, for instance, or expressing any open affinity and concern for the welfare of other Muslims—they also become more likely to commit terrorist crimes, according to the theory.
“In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department helped seed radicalization theory, giving rise to an elaborate lattice of counterterrorism practices that touch on all aspects of Muslim life.” (Amna Akbar,”How Tarek Mehanna Went to Prison for a Thought Crime”)
Countering Violent Extremism
Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), Obama’s signature “counterterrorism” program, based on government-private partnerships, provided a veneer of “community cooperation” to his overall strategies for fighting “terrorism,” which involved monitoring and surveilling Muslim communities. While it continues to amp up aggressive policing and monitoring of Muslim communities, the current administration, which doesn’t share the “liberal” belief that there are “good Muslims” it can work with, has eliminated this CVE program from its 2018 budget.
“Muslim led CVE initiatives grant power to individual groups and leaders to monitor the political activity, speech, and ideas of Muslim Americans. The definitions being utilized for monitoring such activities are set by the state, not by community members. It also grants certain leaders the right to determine what is seen as acceptable dissent, speech, thoughts, and action.” (Darakshan Raja, quoted in Margari Aziza Hill, “Logging It All: CVE and Schisms in the Muslim Community”)
“A coalition of American Muslim and civil rights groups issued a joint statement in advance of the [White House’s 2015 Countering Violent Extremism] summit outlining concerns that community engagement ‘from a CVE standpoint sets American Muslim communities apart as inherently suspect’; that ‘CVE tasks community members to expansively monitor the beliefs and expressive or associational activities of other Muslims’ and ‘creat[es] a climate of fear and chill[s] constitutionally protected activity’; and that ‘mutual trust is difficult, if not impossible,’ given the FBI’s larger set of police practices, including ‘deceptively conducting intelligence gathering under the guise of community outreach,’ and relying on ‘law enforcement agencies [to] play the lead role in implementing CVE . . .’” (Amna Akbar, “National Security’s Broken Windows”)
“The emergence of the neoliberal carceral state entails that poor Black communities are increasingly managed and governed as criminals . . . and subjugated to aggressive Anti-Black forms of policing and surveillance . . . . As such, adopting theories and practices of anti-gang policing into counterterrorism programs and practices targeting the Somali community in the Twin Cities, who are already over-policed . . . , raises concerns around racial profiling and criminalization of Somali Muslims. Given that law-and-order policing informs the ways in which Black criminality is reinforced and inscribed on Black communities, institutionalizing Anti-Black forms [of] policing, such as anti-gang initiative[s], within the function and deployment of CVE programs demonstrates how the criminalization of Somalis is at the heart of domestic counterterrorism efforts in Minnesota.” (Zeinab A. Dahir, “Blurred Intersections: The Anti-Black, Islamophobic Dimensions of CVE Surveillance)
Delaying Citizenship for Muslims
“An investigation by the ACLU of Southern California revealed that since 2008, under a covert program called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), the FBI and US Immigration authorities indefinitely delay immigration benefits to Muslims and individuals from Muslim countries. CARRP profiles using constitutionally protected factors such as religion, national origin and associations with certain Mosques and charities, and flags individuals using flawed watch lists. The report demonstrates CARRP is sometimes used to coerce immigrants to act as informants, and some who refuse to comply are denied immigration benefits.” (“FBI Granted Power to Delay Citizenship for Muslims, ACLU Report Says”)
“The program mandates that immigration services field officers deny or delay, often indefinitely, any application with a potential ‘national security concern,’ which is defined incredibly broadly by USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services]. Some applicants have waited 14 years for a process that should take six months. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit last year against the government over this scheme, more than 19,000 people from 21 Muslim-majority countries or regions were subjected to the programme between 2008 and 2012. Those who have had their applications denied have no means of discovering why, or any meaningful opportunity to respond.” (Moustafa Bayoumi, “It’s Not Just Trump: The US Is Gripped by Anti-Muslim Hysteria”)
Discrimination against Muslim Students in Public Schools
According to CAIR California’s survey of more than 1,000 Muslim students and parents, Unshakable: The Bullying of Muslim Students and the Unwavering Movement to Eradicate It, “A teacher or other school official is reported to have been involved in one in four bullying incidents involving Muslims.” CAIR also found an 18% increase from 2014 to 2016 of bullying and discrimination from teachers, administrators and other officials against Muslim students.
After parents, legislators, and a group called Citizens Against Islamic Indoctrination objected to teaching about Islam as part of the 7th-grade social studies standards, a Tennessee state legislator introduced a bill into the State Legislature that “would ban schools from teaching students younger than 10th grade about Islam or other topics the state decides constitute ‘religious doctrine.’” Other state legislators proposed a bill that would allow decisions about teaching religion in schools to be determined by local school boards. As one bill co-sponsor said, “I’m not opposed to teaching religion. I am opposed to indoctrination and proselytization.”
Examples abound of students who have experienced the anti-Muslim racism of school or school district staff:
- When fourteen-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a Sudanese American Muslim with a keen interest in robotics, brought a clock he had built to school to show to a teacher, teachers thought the clock looked like a bomb. Ahmed was handcuffed, arrested, and questioned by police without the presence of his parents, before he was released without charges. In a district with disproportionate rates of suspension for Black students, he was also suspended for several days.
- A teacher in a California school taught about Islam by using scurrilous descriptions of Sharia law (some found on a rabidly anti-Muslim website). The school district’s initial response was to deny wrongdoing and defend the teacher. Assisted by CAIR, the family of a child in this teacher’s class filed a complaint with the school district, “arguing the teacher’s actions violate state and federal anti-discrimination laws and violate the constitutional separation of church and state.”
- After a Pakistani American Muslim student with learning disabilities in New York was bullied by classmates, middle school administrators reportedly “interrogated him aggressively about ‘if he was a terrorist’ and intimidated him into writing a letter pledging his allegiance to ISIS.” His parents are suing the school and school district.
- An Arizona teacher discriminated against a Muslim Somali refugee student, who according to the ACLU, told him that Trump is “going to deport all you Muslims. Muslims shouldn’t be given visas. They’ll probably take away your visa and deport you. You’re going to be the next terrorist, I bet.” School administrators responded to parent complaints about the teacher and bullying by classmates by suggesting that the student withdraw from school. In 2016, ACLU filed letters of complaint with the S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education.
FBI Use of Informants and Sting Operations
“Since 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has greatly expanded the use of informants who, at the FBI’s behest, infiltrate communities and spy on the activities of millions of law-abiding Americans. In 2008, the FBI disclosed that it had 15,000 informants on its payroll, the most the agency has ever had in history. The FBI has targeted Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities for surveillance and investigation by informants. A vast number of the FBI’s informants are recruited to infiltrate mosques, businesses, and organizations within those communities and to report back on the activities of innocent individuals. The FBI frequently asks informants to monitor activities within the community without any reasonable suspicion that there is criminal activity afoot – a practice that is sanctioned by FBI guidelines.
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“The FBI aggressively targets men of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian descent and attempts to get them to become informants against their own communities. Although a spokesperson for the FBI has stated that its agents are prohibited from using threats or coercion to recruit informants, the Attorney General’s guidelines regarding the use of confidential informants do not explicitly ban this practice. Many individuals have publicly recounted how FBI agents threatened them with baseless terrorism charges or deportation in an attempt to coerce them into becoming informants, or have brought charges against them in retaliation for their refusal to work as informants. Organizations that engage in outreach and provide legal services to individuals within Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities have also reported to us that the FBI’s practice of using intimidation tactics to recruit informants among Muslim men is widespread.” (Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), “Suspicionless Surveillance of Muslim Communities and the Increased Use and Abuse of Muslim Informants”)
“Attorneys at the CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) project, based out of the City University of New York School of Law, have represented dozens of people since 2009 who have been approached by the FBI for voluntary interviews; they say the threat of retribution for those who refuse to become informants is real. ‘The FBI approaches the vast majority of our clients as potential informants to partake in mass surveillance of Muslim communities, unconnected to any real criminal investigation,’ said Amna Akbar, a supervising attorney at CLEAR. ‘The bureau is aggressively attempting to cultivate informants in Muslim communities by using coercion, pressure tactics and intimidation.’” (Petra Bartosiewicz, “Deploying Informants, the FBI Stings Muslims”)
“. . . the FBI under the Obama administration has routinely set up vulnerable losers in terrorism sting plots that in all likelihood would never have happened without the FBI’s dirty work and offers of handsome payouts. During the sentencing phase in one of these cases, the judge herself said it was ‘beyond question that the government created the crime here’, criticising the FBI for sending informants ‘trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role–any role–in criminal activity’.” (Moustafa Bayoumi, “It’s Not Just Trump: The US Is Gripped by Anti-Muslim Hysteria“)
Material Support Laws and Muslim Charities
“The government’s closure and designation as terrorist of three of the largest Muslim American charities in the first three months after the 9/11 attacks sent shockwaves through Muslim communities nationwide. In December 2001 during Ramadan, when Muslim charitable giving is at its yearly peak, the government froze the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Benevolence International Foundation. The subsequent criminal prosecution of their officers, board members, employees, and even contracted fundraisers in the United States alarmed Muslim donors . . .
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“Using Material Support as a Preventive Counterterrorism Tool
“The linchpin of the preventive counterterrorism paradigm consists of those laws that prohibit providing material support to terrorism. These laws are often the fall-back criminal provisions employed when the government cannot prove terrorism charges. But they are so broad and vaguely worded that they effectively criminalize a myriad of activities that would otherwise be constitutionally protected. Moreover, as the government is not statutorily required to prove that the defendant had a specific intent to support terrorism, it has carte blanche to prosecute a broad range of legitimate activities, such as charitable giving, peace building, and human rights advocacy.
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“Disproportionate Enforcement against Muslim Charities
“With few exceptions, the executive branch has exercised its broad discretion to selectively target Muslim charities engaged in seemingly legitimate humanitarian aid. The result is a serious chilling effect on Muslim communities’ willingness to openly partake in political dissent and for Muslim charities to effectively provide international aid using religiously mandated charitable donations to places like Somalia.
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“Shutting Down Charities Based on Mere Allegations
“Unbeknownst to many, a formal terrorist designation is not necessary to figuratively tar and feather a charity. A mere investigation by the Department of Treasury is enough to trigger the asset-freezing provision of sanctions laws, thus paralyzing the organization. The law does not require the Treasury Department to have probable cause of a violation of the regulations, nor is it required to seek approval from a judge, either before or after the freeze is imposed.
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“Guilt Without Proof of Wrongdoing
“Despite the statute’s clear meaning, some courts have interpreted material support laws in a way that relieves prosecutors from having to prove that a charity provided donations directly to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
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“Collateral Prosecution and the Surveillance of Muslim Donors
“While few individual donors have been prosecuted for material support arising out of the charities’ prosecutions, many have experienced collateral prosecution on account of their donations to charities under investigation or being prosecuted. The resulting fear of collateral adverse consequences is striking and significantly undermines donors’ confidence in the government’s interest in protecting their fundamental right to religious freedom.” (Sahar F. Aziz, “Countering Religion or Terrorism: Selective Enforcement of Material Support Laws against Muslim Charities”)
The Muslim Bans
The Trump administration has been trying to ban Muslims from the United States practically since the day he was inaugurated. After widespread protests against his two earliest Executive Orders, which called for 90-day bans on people from seven majority Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), Trump issued a revised Executive Order in September 2017. This iteration indefinitely banned travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen), as well as North Korea, a country that “accounted for just 61 affected visas” in 2016. Three of the six majority-Muslim countries identified are in African countries, another way in which Islamophobia intersects with anti-Black racism.
The list also barred from entry Venezuelan government officials and their families. The addition of North Korea and a very small group of people from Venezuela was essentially a “fig leaf” to make it appear that the new Executive Order was not meant to be a “Muslim ban.”
When this Muslim Ban was issued, Zahra Billoo, director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of CAIR, “called the new order from Trump ‘another attempt to hide the executive order’s discriminatory purpose. … Instead of promoting values that uplift our nation, the president continues to pander to an extremist, white supremacist base.’”
In December 2017, the Supreme Court lifted the injunctions that the Fourth and Ninth Circuits had granted and reinstated the Muslim Ban, allowing it to take full effect without ruling on its constitutionality. But in June 2018, the Supreme Court rejected the challenges to the Muslim Ban, finding it constitutional and allowing its provisions to go into effect fully.
In January 2020, almost exactly three years to the date of the initial Executive Order, a new Executive Order forbade permanent immigration to people from six additional countries: Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, and Tanzania. Almost all have predominantly or large Muslim populations, ranging from 30% Muslim in Tanzania to 86% Muslim in Kyrgyzstan. The exception is Myanmar (4% Muslim), where more than a million Rohingya Muslims have already fled the country to avoid an “ongoing genocidal campaign.”
Patrice S. Lawrence of the UndocuBlack Network puts the addition to the Ban of four African countries into context:
The reasons keep changing about why it is that the Trump administration wants to keep Black and Brown people out. And that’s because there is no honest reason, except for racism and xenophobia. Behind these bans and visa sanctions are real people with real families—facing the pain and uncertainty that family separation brings.
The attack on African migration isn’t a new tactic—from abruptly ending Temporary Protected Status, to the 2017 visa sanctions on Eritrea, and a 21% drop in Nigerians traveling to the US due to visa restrictions—this expansion will be a continuation of Trump’s white supremacist agenda seeking to end the migration of Black and Brown people.”
Trump’s Muslim Bans are only the latest exclusionary U.S. immigration policy that mostly relate to race and racism. They follow, for example, others that excluded immigrants from China, from all Asian countries, and from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Jewish emigres. The 1952 Immigration Act kept Asian quotas low; ensured that 85% of immigrants would come from northern and western Europe; and tightened restrictions on people from the Caribbean and “closed the door to virtually every other would-be black immigrant.” The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act targeted Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in its expansion of the type of immigrants who, due to alleged “terrorist” activities, could not be admitted to the country or could be deported.
The Muslim-Bashing “Counterterrorism” Training Industry
“. . . a vocal and influential sub-group of the private counterterrorism training industry markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam—a world religion with 1.3 billion adherents—as inherently violent and even terroristic.” (Thomas Cincotta, Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security
“The FBI library at Quantico currently [in 2011] stacks books from authors who claim that ‘Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.’ The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the ‘inherently violent nature of Islam,’ according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks ‘domination of the world,’ according to a law enforcement source.” (Spencer Ackerman, “New Evidence of Anti-Islam Bias Underscores Deep Challenges for FBI’s Reform Pledge”) (The Joint Terrorism Task Forces are “a nationwide partnership between the FBI, intelligence analysts, and state and local police.”)
After Wired published anti-Muslim materials used for training FBI agents in 2012, the Obama administration ordered a review of counterterrorism trainings, resulting in an FBI purge of hundreds of anti-Muslim training documents. But the problem persisted, as illustrated by the 2014 publication by The Intercept of National Security Agency documents containing anti-Muslim bias.
“The documents obtained by The Intercept [through a 2017 Freedom of Information request] underscore how federal law enforcement and members of the military continue to frequent anti-Muslim trainings, despite past attempts to stop Islamophobic instructors from teaching soldiers and federal officers. Advocates have long expressed concern that such events encourage racial profiling and further corrode trust between government agencies and Muslim communities already weary of surveillance and infiltration by informants. They say these trainings are particularly troublesome at a time of rising anti-Muslim sentiment—sentiment that has been blessed by members of the Trump administration.” (Alex Kane, “Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theorist Trained Senior U.S. Marshal, National Guard Members, Documents Show”)
Anti-Muslim conspiracy training is a cottage industry, with self-appointed security experts on the “threat” of all Muslims having access to government employees, with little oversight—for example:
- John Guandolo, a disgraced former FBI agent, has offered trainings for local police and district attorney offices, federal contractors, and the Joint Forces Staff College [Alex]. He has said that Muslims do not have First Amendment rights, and that “Muslim houses of worship in the U.S. serve as ‘military base[s]’ and should not be ‘afforded the same legal rights’ as churches.”
- In 2017, CAIR called on the U.S. Air Force to “sever ties” with Patrick Dunleavy, who was teaching a course called “The Dynamics of International Terrorism” at the S. Air Force Special Operations School. Dunleavy is a “senior fellow” with Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a group identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others as a prominent anti-Muslim hate group.
NSEERS (National Security Entry Exit Registration System)
NSEERS, instituted shortly after 9/11, required nonimmigrant males 16 years and older from 24 Muslim countries (and North Korea) to register at an immigration office, where they were fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed at length. Those who failed to comply, as well as some who attempted to comply, were detained and deported. NSEERS affected more than 80,000 Muslim men and their families. The government suspended NSEERS in 2011 and ended it in 2016, after the Obama administration concluded that it had not improved security. Diala Shamas views NSEERS as “a very recent historical precedent for Trump’s proposal” and comments that it has an effect on “thousands of families to this day.”
“Repeatedly condemned by the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, NSEERS mandated ethnic profiling on a scale not seen in the United States since Japanese-American internment during World War II and the ‘Operation Wetback’ deportations to Mexico of 1954. . . .
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“Although NSEERS was conceived as a program to prevent terrorist attacks, among the tens of thousands of people forced to register, the government did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction. NSEERS proved completely ineffective as a counterterrorism tool while failing to give proper notice to many of its targets and often violating their right to counsel. This led to the deportations of thousands of men and boys from Arab- and Muslim-majority countries for civil immigration violations that were frequently based simply on a failure to understand NSEERS’ arcane rules.” (ACLU, “Homeland Security Suspends Ineffective, Discriminatory Immigration Program”)
No-Fly List
Federal No-Fly lists, which deny people the right to board a commercial aircraft flying to, from, or within U.S. territory, disproportionately impacts Muslims. This database had around 64,000 people on it in 2014. As the ACLU reports, “People on the No Fly List are stigmatized as suspected terrorists, barred from commercial flight altogether, and have been detained, interrogated, surveilled, and subjected to long-term investigation.”
“Based on all the publicly known examples that I am aware of, and all of my clients, the no-fly list is almost entirely populated by Muslims or individuals assumed to be Muslim. Federal courts have ruled that the process to challenge one’s placement on this list is constitutionally inadequate, and there have been some recent, limited revisions to this process. But it remains arduous and unpredictable, the criteria for placement on the list remains too broad and the list—which likely continues to grow — is riddled with errors.” (Diala Shamas, “Four Ways the U.S. Is Already Banning Muslims”)
“Prior to lawsuits challenging the No-Fly List, the government operated the list in near-total secrecy and never told people why they were on it or gave them a meaningful chance to dispute their placement. Despite some reforms made under the pressure of litigation, attorneys say the procedures governing who is placed on the list and how to challenge that placement remain gravely deficient, and the lack of transparency and accountability still leaves the No-Fly List, and other watch lists, ripe for abuse.
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“‘The FBI agents basically told our clients that they could spy against fellow Muslims who were not suspected of any crime, in violation of their own Islamic beliefs, or they could forget about flying to see their families or for work,’ said Professor Ramzi Kassem, founding director of the CLEAR project, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, at CUNY School of Law, who argued today. ‘The fact that they were taken off the list after they sued does not end the story. Our clients were unable to see wives, children, sick parents, and elderly grandparents overseas for years. They also lost jobs, were stigmatized within their communities, and suffered severe financial and emotional distress. They deserve redress for these harms.’” (Center for Constitutional Rights, “American Muslims Coerced to Spy Urge Court to Reinstate No-Fly List Lawsuit”)
Regulations Regarding Muslim Prisoners
“The War on Terror converted American prisons into battlegrounds, pitting prison officials against ‘radical Islam.’ Although Islam ranks as the fastest growing religion, both inside and outside of American prisons, prison authorities still deny Muslim-American inmates fundamental First Amendment religious liberties in the name of suppressing Islamic radicalization and maintaining prison security. Incarcerated Muslims, representing a milieu of races and sectarian traditions, are at the head of state and federal litigation demanding accommodation of general Islamic and specific sectarian religious practices. The demonization of Islam as a means to deny Muslim inmates religious rights is not a new phenomenon, but a penal strategy that commenced nearly fifty-four years ago.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Islam Incarcerated: Religious Accommodation of Muslim Prisoners before Holt v. Hobbs”)
“Under the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, prison rules that impose a substantial burden on the free exercise rights of prisoners are subject to strict judicial scrutiny. In this case, prison officials in Arkansas denied petitioner an exemption from the institution’s hair grooming policy to permit him to grow a one-half inch beard in compliance with his religious beliefs. They justified their decision on the grounds of prison security but never demonstrated why prison security would be jeopardized by an exemption that the overwhelming majority of prison systems in the country would allow. The ACLU submitted an amicus brief on behalf of former corrections officials explaining that a blanket refusal to accommodate a religious hair grooming exemption does more to undermine prison security than to enhance it.
“Status: Victory! On January 20, 2015, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld prisoners’ religious rights, ruling that Arkansas’s grooming policy violated the law.” (ACLU, Holt v. Hobbs)
Selective Enforcement/Selective Prosecutions
“. . . it is not clear that selective enforcement is even an available defense. As a result, Arab and Muslim foreign nationals with any possible immigration problem are well advised to do nothing—such as speaking out, demonstrating, or joining political associations—that might bring them to the attention of the authorities.” (David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism)
“Women Against Islamophobia and Racism (WAIR) supports the Irvine 11, Muslim students at the University of California at Irvine, and questions the finding that they are guilty for the ‘crime’ of interrupting the speech on campus of Israel Ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 to protest Israeli policies. As has happened when other students were involved in similarly nonviolent political protests on campus, U.C. Irvine administrators took internal disciplinary action—suspending the campus Muslim Student Union for a school quarter.
“We cannot understand the decision to try the Irvine 11 and the jury’s [guilty] verdict as anything else but selective prosecution. When a group of Jewish students from Jewish Voice for Peace interrupted a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there were no legal repercussions. The difference is that the Irvine 11 students were Muslims. They were clearly prosecuted because they had committed the nonviolent act of ‘shouting while Muslim.’ We object as strongly as we can to the unjust and discriminatory singling out of Muslims by the legal system.” (Women Against Islamophobia and Racism, “WAIR Supports Irvine 11”)
“The inability to procure legal counsel leads to innocent indigent Muslim Americans being unjustly convicted and sentenced at far higher rates than middle- or upper-class Muslim Americans. Following the trend of indigent Americans at large, ‘[a]s a result of inadequate representation, many [poor] people have been illegally convicted and sentenced.’ The combination of expanding CVE policing and preexisting federal surveillance and community policing exposes indigent Muslim Americans to serious risk of unjust arrest and detention. Furthermore, unjust anti-terror prosecutions, which come with far harsher penalties, are an acute danger to indigent Muslim Americans due to the enhanced focus of federal and local anti-terror policing strategies on poor and working-class Muslim American enclaves.
“This selective prosecution and harsher sentencing of indigent Muslim Americans amid the still-escalating War on Terror is exacerbated by lack of access to specialized attorneys—those who understand the intersection between the criminal justice system, national security and anti-terror policies, and immigration enforcement systems, which in concert function to target indigent and working-class Muslim American communities.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Between Indigence, Islamophobia, and Erasure: Poor and Muslim in “War on Terror” America”)
The USA PATRIOT Act
“[After 9/11,] Congress swiftly passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which, among other things, allowed the government to detain suspected noncitizen ‘terrorists’ for up to a week without charges, and bolstered federal law enforcement surveillance powers over citizens and noncitizens associated with ‘terrorism.’ (Susan M. Akram & Kevin R. Johnson, “Race, Civil Rights, and Immigration Law after September 11, 2001: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims”)
“[Among its provision are] sections making it a crime to offer ‘expert advice’ to a proscribed political group, regardless of its content; allowing the government to freeze the assets of suspected charities without any showing of wrongdoing, and based on secret evidence; and permitting foreign nationals to be locked up without charges, deported for innocent political associations and kept out of the country for endorsing any group the government labels as ‘terrorist’ . . . .” (David Cole, “Patriot Act Post-Mortem”)
“Although the stipulations in the PATRIOT Act and other Department of Justice decrees ostensibly apply to all Americans, they effectively single out Arab and Muslim Americans. As Louise Cainkar comments, ‘[Attorney General] Ashcroft has already removed more Arabs and Muslims (who were neither terrorists nor criminals) from the United States in the past year than the total number of foreign national deported in the infamous Palmer raids of 1919’ (Cainkar, 2003). Expanded secret evidence procedures are used to keep Muslims under arrest, and other provisions for the intelligence community resulted in FBI interrogations at Muslim and Arab community and religious centers across the United States.” (Amaney Jamal, “Civil Liberties and the Otherization of Arab and Muslim Americans”)