The Day America Forgot: 9/12

America’s Disappeared and the Targeting of Muslim Men

Police presence was a constant outside Muslim community centres and mosques after 9/11. Photo credit: Julian Vigo

Hisham is a tailor, originally from Cairo, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1990s, sponsored by his employer, a Brooklyn-based fine suit maker which was contracted by Neiman Marcus. As Hisham recounts, he does a “skilled job,” something, he reminds me, “very very few who can do what I do—to make handmade suits, handmade buttonholes and handmade stitches.” He was sponsored on a “skilled worker” visa. Hisham was the subject of my research in the largely Muslim community which lived within the kilometre radius of Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue and Avenue H from 2004 until 2010 when he was disappeared by the US government. 

9/11 ushered in a new era in American politics where the government set out to retrieve the bodies of the 2,973 who lost their lives on that day and to construct a historical narrative for that particular tragedy. Many of the families of those who died in and around the World Trade Center, for instance, were told that their loved ones were “disappeared” since of the 2,753 killed, only 293 bodies were found intact with an additional 1,640 bodies or partial remains being able to be correctly identified. This means that 1,113 victims were completely unidentified as the families of the dead were given no physical trace of the lives lost. (The actual numbers are skewed here as the official number was changed two years after 9/11 to incorporate those who died as a result of exposure to dust from the site or who went missing.) As part of the process of identification, a retracing of these missing bodies necessarily assumes their deaths. Yet, without the somatic remnants, these individuals deaths remain in a sort of limbo such that the identifying those killed has come to mean a rehashing of histories, teasing out the lies from the truth, and a negotiating the masses in the struggle to incorporate a democratic voice for properly locating both the whereabouts and the facts surrounding the events of 9/11, as well as maintaining access to the memory of these lost lives. This last often involves a cultural dialogue between the critique of official history and collective memories. As the dead subject can no longer speak, storytelling and performance become the root of social justice transposed from the body of the disappeared to those family and friends who speak for them of the crime in clear and loud tones. The status of being taken away, the somatic absence, creates an aporetic space where many other stories are obfuscated by the official narrative of 9/11. 

These acts and artefacts of remembrance only represent one facet of the official history of 9/11. What is left out of this rendering are the 14,000 Muslim men disappeared in the aftermath of 9/11 resulting largely from Special Registration, officially known as National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). Special Registration presumed the necessity of mass surveillance and nationwide propaganda that was commonplace in the years following 9/11 and which largely continue to this day. Just over a year after 11 September 2001, the Metropolitan Transport Authority of New York City ran the series of ads, “If you see something, say something,” forewarning subway commuters of abandoned bags or rucksacks left under subway platform or passenger seats. The subtitle could not have directed a clearer message to New Yorkers: “Be suspicious…” where the object of suspicion was left ambiguous, if not bulky and dark. This public campaign was launched just a few months before the United States’ government initiated Special Registration, a process which required Muslim male immigrants over the age of 16 to register with Homeland Security (the agency created in the aftermath of 9/11 which replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Services). 

Police cruisers and unmarked police vehicles were a constant presence outside the mosque that Hisham attended. Pro bono lawyers and human rights advocates like Bobby Khan would organise workshops for families in helping them locate their husbands, brothers, and sons. Others performed political protests outside the Federal Building in lower Manhattan protesting the disappearance of their friends and family members. Like these protests, art also served to reconcile inexplicable acts of violence through public forums, debates and art shows, such as Chitra Ganesh’s Index of the Disappeared (White Box Gallery, 2004). 

It should be noted that Special Registration was made possible specifically because of two Clinton-era 1996 laws, Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) which, according to Human Rights Watch “eliminated key defences against deportation and subjected many more immigrants, including legal permanent residents, to detention and deportation” along with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). Essentially these immigration reforms intensified collateral civil penalties to non-citizens while focussing governmental efforts on specifically Muslim communities within the United States. As Marc Krupanski, Program Officer at the Open Society Foundation’s Center for Constitutional Rights, tells me:

In 1996 the Clinton administration passed legal immigration reform, IIRIRA. Those sets of laws really increase the space of what is deportable and what [requires] mandatory detention, It created aggravated felony for immigration offences, and it’s just really created what we see and call a two-tiered system and it’s an Apartheid state for immigrants in the United States. Immigrants are entirely seen as second class and have second-class rights vis-à-vis citizens…There’s the example we always use that you have a non-citizen immigrant who gets charged with driving while drunk. He goes to court and doesn’t serve any time, pleads guilty, gets six months probation. You have a citizen who has that same charge and also has a drug charge, a narcotics charge of cocaine. The person gets away scot-free—you know, the charges are dropped. A non-citizen immigrant, after those six months, would then be put into immigration detention and be deported, because it’s an aggravating felony. And a citizen on the other hand, without serving any time becomes the president of the United States, which is what happened with George Bush. And so, just looking at it in that sense, just how, if you are a non-citizen...you have to pay your pittance twice.

In the wake of 9/11 the US government took the mandate from these 1996 laws and expanded them to openly target Muslim males from a list of 25 countries of which all but one (North Korea) were predominantly Arab and Muslim countries. Also, there was the surveillance of mosques, Muslim cultural centres, Muslim neighbourhoods, and eventually wider surveillance of New York’s subway system, parks, and bridges. This fact forced many New Yorkers—both Muslim and non-Muslim—to use other means of travel and to avoid certain types of activities, least they be suspect of “terrorist photography” or “bridge reconnaissance.” Even the harassment of immigrants seeking asylum was well-documented in the years following 9/11 which was not limited to Muslims and Arabs but generally pertained to non-white immigrants.

While the INS had begun formulating the process of Special Registration in 2002, it was with the creation of Homeland Security in 2002 (not officially beginning operations until January 2003) that brought Special Registration to its full form which included requiring men from, initially, 18 different countries to register:

Men from selected countries or those who match "intelligence-based criteria" are subject to the new rules. Temporary foreign visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Syria must register by December 16. Visiting citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates or Yemen must register by January 10, 2003.

Registration includes, typically, a meeting with an immigration official where the interviewees are fingerprinted (both digitally and by ink), photographed, and then they are interviewed and asked a series of questions under oath. In addition to the initial registration, foreign visitors are also required to appear at a U.S. immigration office within 10 days of the first anniversary of their initial registration and required to complete a departure check only at a designated departure port on the same day that they intend to leave the country. The government thus considered the refusal to register as a criminal offence and the overstaying of any form of visa is a civil violation. It also treated any minor visa violations, late submissions, or even paperwork dependant upon employer sponsorship as a deportable offence. 

Because of Special Registration, there was a roundup and detention of Arab and Muslim men carried out with unprecedented secrecy violating the very basic civil rights which are guaranteed by the US Constitution and the human rights delineated by the Universal Declaration which the United States helped draft (Eleanor Roosevelt was the Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and played a major role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948). In the months following 9/11, approximately 14,000 men were virtually disappeared from civil society in the United States as part of the US government's implementation of the Patriot Act as executed through its Homeland Security Department. Contiguous to the quite visible and much-discussed rendering of the dead of 9/11 and their memorialisation in American society in the years since 9/11, there has been a disturbing silence in American media and society at large regarding the routine rounding up, interrogation and imprisonment of these men of Arab origin throughout the United States that took place in the months following 9/11. 

I met Hisham regularly from 2004 in various parts of the city as he was forced to take on part-time jobs around the city, to include serving as a janitor of a apartment building in the East Village. Hisham recounts his registration experience:

They didn't arrest me. They didn't take me in custody. Nobody, you know, took me. They said come to register, I went to register, so I thought the process of registration is going to be like what is your name, how did you get to the country? You know, where do you live? What are you doing, and that's it. So now to tell them where I am, who I am, what I'm doing, you know, who I live with and things like this. And that's it. So, you know, and then I found out that, you know, they took me to the 10th floor. And on the 10th floor, they put me in the glass room, and then after they took pictures and then he gave me the papers and he said: "Your court is going to be on that date". And I said, "Court? why? Why court?" You know, I got surprised, I was shocked that I had to go to court because people usually people understand that court means that you've done something wrong. But no one caught me, no one stopped me, no one took me, because I hadn't done anything wrong.

Hisham defends Special Registration initially; yet, as he explains his story, he sees the contradictions in the defence of a system which sets out to shift the historical goalposts:

I came to this country with a lot of hope, you know. And I came to work, to put my kids in the school, to grow them up in a different way, in a better way, better life way, you know. And I had many people, they wanted me to work for them. For what I'm doing, I'm doing something, you know, it's not just—because I could have found any job in my country to make a living. But the point is that my skills are not common. There are not too many people in the world today who can do what I do. So, one day when I was working for one of the biggest designers in the country, making handmade buttonholes. So, my employer spoke to me and they said, " One of the biggest stores, Neiman Marcus, had a party, and they wanted to give their clients a gift. They had me sew buttonholes to put it in two pieces of fabric—one is wool cashmere and the other one is silk. I was told to put them one on top of the other and then to make a buttonhole by hand and to package that box and then Neiman Marcus would offer it to their clients as a gift at the end of that same year—December 2001. The firm where I worked closed for Christmas vacation and when I went back after the holidays they kept me for one week and then for no reason they said, “You know, you can’t stay on.”

Hisham had been caught up in Special Registration and overnight his life would change forever. He went from being a documented worker with the protection of a visa class for highly skilled artisans and due to the fear over Special Registration and having a Muslim man who dressed not too dissimilarly from the images of so-called terrorists popping up nighty on Fox News and CNN, his employer wanted to distance themselves from Hisham.

In 2017 as I read of protests in the US and the UK against President Trump, I was reminded of the particular form of amnesia that has selectively struck from history the vestiges of President Trump’s current attempts to ban immigrants from certain countries, albeit only seven of the long list of countries from previous administrations. With the then media diversions of #BathRobeGate and Obama’s vacation with Richard Branson, one might think that Trump’s current push to control immigration came from nowhere. The reality, however, is that all that Trump proposes has been, in various forms, done before through Special Registration which embodied some of the most vicious policies that the three presidents preceding Trump not only enacted and/or enforced but against which there was virtually no public outcry. Even the recent proclamation by Homeland Security which went on record stating that Trump’s proposed ban does not target Muslims, but seven nations which are predominantly Muslim (the myth being that geographies and not people are the objects of scrutiny), was precisely what John Ashcroft stated when Homeland Security established its list of 25 countries. 

Although Special Registration finally ended in 2011, its cultural remnants remain today. For instance, in New York’s transport system today persists the 8th generation versions of public service announcements to include the multimedia adaptations of the “If you see something, say something” message from December 2002. as the suspicion of Muslims and Muslim Americans in the United States has now reached previously unimaginable depths. Since its adoption by New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority, “See Something, Say Something” was also embraced by the City of Chicago, nationally with Department of Homeland Security, and abroad to include a variation in the United Kingdom. 

Hisham’s response to this public message is poetic, as he deftly defends America’s “right” to investigate crimes against humanity while noting the hyper-surveillance he had been subjected to in the aftermath of 9/11, especially as a man whose fashion and beard indicate that he is a practising Muslim:

When you see something, say something. You know, I almost want to tell the people, I’m not that something they, you know, they advertise for. It's not me. I'm not that something. So then, you know, most of the time I have to open my bag to make sure that the people sitting next to me, or someone standing in front of me, you know, to see what's in my bag.

During my fieldwork in New York which spanned seven years, I worked with community activists, lawyers, civil rights organisations, local artists, and Muslim targets of Special Registration from Brooklyn. Hisham was one of many Muslim men who recounted their stories to me. 

Even in my first meeting with the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), I was told of the queues out their offices and down the street which alerted them to the situation of the many disappeared Muslim men post-9/11 as women showed up in the hundreds asking, “Where is my brother/husband/son?” Bryan Lonegan, a prominent immigrants rights advocate recounts similar episodes:

Immediately following September 11, we started getting calls of people who disappeared. I'd get calls from relatives, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives. “My husband disappeared.” “My son disappeared. We don't know where he is. He went to work, we haven't heard from him.” And there was an initial period, a blackout period of a couple of weeks where nobody could find out anything about what was happening to these people. And as you know, the government picked up over a thousand people. And then finally after a couple of weeks, they started to release information. If they would tell you–they wouldn’t release who they had, but if you gave them a name, they’d tell you whether they had the person. So one day we had a phone call – we were unable to help anybody who said, “Where’s my son, where’s my father?” Then one day we got a phone call from a detainee at the MDC (Manhattan Detention Center): “My name is such and such, please I need help, I'm at the MDC .” That was the whole message. So, we went to the MDC, myself and another lawyer, and we said, “We want to see this guy.” Now, we were actually expecting that they would say no. But to our surprise, they brought us up to the SHU (special housing units).

Lonegan went on to detail for me the vast abuses at MDC which he was surprised to find had been accurately documented in two separate reports by the Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, which details numerous violations of physical and verbal assault. Despite that the DOJ reports representing accurately what he observed at the MDC, Lonegan was concerned by other aspects of these reports, namely that they clearly document the violation of constitutional and statutory laws regarding attorney-client privilege:

But one of the things that caught my eye personally, was that there was a couple of pages in which they said—and then we found all these tapes because they were taping everything these guys did 24 hours a day. And the included tapes, audio and visual, I mean, video and audio recordings, of interviews between these guys and us, their attorneys, which is a gross violation of constitutional and statutory law….So, that's what I talk about the creeping effect on American citizens. It's not just the emigrants, but here I was, just this lawyer, trying to make sure that their constitutional was. You know, I consider myself to be fairly conservative, not even any kind of extremists or radical. But I know in the current government's view I'm, like, off the chart. But all I am trying to do is to defend the Constitution.

Fast forward to Edward Snowden’s revelations of Prism in 2013, and it is not difficult to see the connection between the surveillance of one fraction of society and how this can be turned upon the general population. Yet, in various media debates over Trump’s targeting of Muslims during his first term, the facts of this history have been entirely forgotten. they have even been overwritten by the Democratic Party’s propaganda machinery in the hopes that this might turn Americans who, in 2001, were silent as their neighbours were being put into detention centres.

As Kareem Shora, the then Director of the Legal Department and Policy at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee details, the system of Special Registration was simply not clear to many: 

We saw a lot of problems with this registration, even in the way it was announced, it was not implemented in the way that it was announced. For example, from group one and group two, a lot of people didn’t know they had to register because nobody told them. When they first announced group one, they didn’t send letters, they did not make any public announcements, they didn’t contact the Arab embassies that were involved. All they did was that they published it on the federal register, which is published every day with the new regulations from the federal government on all levels. Nobody really reads the federal register. Not even members of Congress read it. And the first time that INS published it was, in fact, ten days before the deadline. On their website, they put, you know, their announcements on their website. Ten days— it was December 6th, 2001. Exactly ten days before December 16th when the first group should have—the deadline for the first group of countries. And people who did not register were basically, would face deportations and criminal proceedings as well. As a result of that, they did file a two-week extension in January, a kind of an Amnesty period for those who did not register, who did not know about it, to register within that two-week timeframe. But that, obviously,...was very indicative that at the time the federal government was viewing men from these countries as suspects. Whether the Attorney General says yes or no, this is what the expression is. The federal government, the Justice Department, views these men from these 25 countries as suspects.

What is interesting to note is that in the days following this announcement, liberal media like CNN did not report on the roundup of these men. This very media which has written about the “mega failure” of the Bush era doctrine ironically couldn’t be bothered to report the details of these failures and disappearances at the time.

Later, Marc Krupanski told me of the difficulty in finding those men who had been arrested on immigration violations who were taken away to prisons in New York and throughout the United States. Their whereabouts often took weeks, if not months, to ascertain:

We were waiting, you know, for weeks or more than a couple of months to even know where people were. You know, because right after, that’s... when I started to hear the term “disappeared” being used a lot more. It’s just that nobody knew where their family members, community members were. After a few weeks, we would finally get confirmation that they were held in MDC [Manhattan Detention Center] and then they had to fill out the paperwork and wait longer….The same thing is kind of happening–people have been moved. People in New Jersey—oftentimes people in New York get arrested and get put into a detention centre in New Jersey, and then moved from there to Pennsylvania or moved to Louisiana. That really disrupts and greatly fractures any sort of community and family ties—but also legal ties, too.

The reality is that the United States has a very long history of racially profiling immigrants. And this tradition goes back even before the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) which prohibited the immigration of Chinese labourers, a law that was not repealed until 1943.

Of the 83,519 men interviewed under Special Registration between September 2002 and September 2003, according to Homeland Security statistics, at least 13,799 landed in deportation proceedings and were placed in removal. Many remain unaccounted for by family members and others received cruel treatment upon return to their home countries where those suffering from HIV were not welcome and others were in danger of being classified as political prisoners. Of those individuals who were deported, not a single person was found to have any links to terrorist or violent activities.

Where the past four years has seen the focus by the American Democratic party blaming the right for all the ills of immigration, there has been a notable double-speak from the left—both in terms of political party rhetoric and media representation— on this matter considering that Special Registration would not have been legally possible without Clinton having laid the bedrock for it. Our task should be to understand where Trump’s political trajectory is emanating historically and not to annex Trump as some anomaly of American political culture. In the era where immigration is being rethought in the EU as what is called the “refugee crisis” is tipping political scales, we must understand that across the pond Trump is not the exception here but is very much the rule. Trump’s policies are not uniquely the rule of the Republican Party but are the result of decades of American bipartisan politics within which immigrants have always been underpaid, abused, exploited, and deported as part of a larger partisan political scheme.

Ten years later, I have been unable to find Hisham and was told by his neighbour in 2010, “They came for him and took him away.” The “they” here is Homeland Security. I recall Hisham being terrified of the US government deporting him to Egypt as then President Hosni Mubarak was known to toss deportees from other countries into prison as he considered them political liabilities. I was told the same from many human rights lawyers working on the cases of the disappeared.

In remembering those lost in 9/11, we must not forget the many men disappeared by the American government whose families today, still have no idea where these men are. Our repeating historical lessons over and over must come to a stop at some point. It’s not even a question of when at this point. Given the use of immigration by both the left and the right to score political points while simultaneously not taking on the fine print of what is at stake in a world divided by the wealth, the conversation has barely begun.