A woman in hijab walks through the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia. Muslim Americans are frequent targets of racial profiling.
Chapter 5
Counterterrorism and Islamophobia
In August 2010, US citizen Hassan Shibly, his wife, and their baby were returning to the United States after a trip to the Middle East. Shibly said that Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers searched his luggage and asked religiously oriented questions, including, “Are you part of any Islamic tribe? Have you ever studied Islam full time? How many gods do you believe in?”
A 2011 Pew Research survey reported that 36 percent of Muslim Americans who had flown into or out of US airports in the previous year said they had been targeted by airport security for extra screening. Airline staff and passengers also single out Muslim Americans as potential threats and take independent action. In 2016 alone, several airlines removed Muslim passengers from flights because other passengers said they felt unsafe. These incidents reflect a US government policy that takes racial profiling to a level beyond conventional law enforcement.
A Controversial Strategy
Racial profiling has been an official part of the US government’s antiterrorism strategy since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Established in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this cabinet-level department has the stated goal of keeping Americans safe from a variety of threats, particularly terrorism. The DHS absorbed and reorganized a variety of existing agencies, including the TSA, US Customs and Border Protection, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As part of the DHS’s antiterrorism mission, workers in airport security and border patrol jobs began using race and religion as significant, authorized factors in screening to identify potential Islamist terrorists.
Some observers feel these measures are a justified use of limited profiling. However, others criticize the tactics, especially when the focus on Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent spread beyond airport security lines and entered into questionable legal and ethical territory. For instance, following 9/11, the NYPD carried out targeted surveillance of Muslims in New York City and beyond, sending undercover officers into predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, as well as monitoring mosques and Muslim student groups. The NYPD also created files on the activities of individual Muslims. In 2012 Muslim American and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the City of New York, charging that the surveillance violated civil rights and was unlawfully prejudicial. The case was initially dismissed, but in 2015, a panel of three federal judges ruled that the plaintiffs had the right to pursue the lawsuit. One of these judges, Thomas L. Ambro, wrote in the panel’s decision: “We have been down similar roads before. [Government policies toward] . . . African-Americans during the civil rights movement and Japanese-Americans during World War II are examples that readily spring to mind. We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight, that ‘loyalty is a matter of the heart and mind, not race, creed or color.’”
Aside from the ethical questions the practice raises, profiling aimed at Muslims isn’t always accurate or knowledgeable. For example, many Sikhs—followers of the Sikhism religion—are stopped by agents and officers who mistake them for Muslims. Most Sikhs are of Indian descent. As part of their faith, many Sikh men wear turbans and many women wear headscarves. TSA agents and others sometimes confuse these head coverings with those worn by Muslims and target Sikhs for extra screening and monitoring. In general, people with dark skin are also singled out for heightened scrutiny, even though Muslims do not necessarily have dark skin. An anonymous, white TSA officer at Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, says of his fellow airport security officers, “They just pull aside anyone who they don’t like the way they look—if they are black and have expensive clothes or jewelry, or if they are Hispanic.”
By contrast, Khalid El Khatib, a light-skinned Palestinian American who is Muslim, notes that while he frequently undergoes extra screening at airports, TSA personnel “are quick to admit that it’s likely because of my name and often acknowledge it’s unfair. I can’t help but feel this [apologetic attitude] is because of my whiteness, the sameness I share with these airport workers. I can’t imagine a gate agent would tell my father, with his accent and thick black mustache, that they’re sorry—that he probably doesn’t deserve the extra hassle.”
Muslim passengers on US flights frequently report being profiled by airline staff and by fellow passengers. Airline employees have asked people to get off flights if they are speaking Arabic, for instance.
Besides scrutinizing Middle Eastern travelers in general, the DHS maintains numerous terrorist watch lists. In 2004 the DHS launched Operation Front Line, a classified program that aims to identify possible terrorists by investigating more than twenty-five hundred foreigners living in the United States. DHS officials questioned foreigners from a range of Middle Eastern nations about their religious practices, their feelings about the United States, and whether they had access to biological or chemical weapons. The DHS stated that the targets of these investigations were identified “without regard to race, ethnicity or religion.” However, records revealed that 79 percent of the people investigated came from nations with majority Muslim populations. Furthermore, very few targets of the investigation were ultimately charged with any crime. Those who did face charges were typically accused of immigration violations but not of posing threats to national security. An analysis by the National Litigation Project at Yale Law School concluded that as a tool to identify likely terrorists, the program was an expensive, time-consuming failure.
In 2014 the online publication the Intercept obtained classified government documents related to the US government’s confidential Terrorist Screening Database. According to the Intercept’s analysis of these documents, this database of terrorist suspects includes more than 650,000 people, of whom nearly one-half have no known connections to established terrorist groups.
The most notorious DHS list is the highly confidential no-fly list. It is believed to name tens of thousands of people—including hundreds of American citizens—who are not permitted to fly into or out of the United States. Many have committed no crimes. Most have no idea their names are on this list. And most are of Arab descent.
One person on the no-fly list, Saeb Mokdad, is a businessperson of Lebanese origin. Mokdad had never been convicted of a crime, and he has been a US citizen since 1991. Nevertheless, Mokdad was prevented from flying to Lebanon three times and came to suspect that he was on the no-fly list. (Some of his Lebanese relatives had been involved in several kidnappings, which Mokdad suspects triggered his inclusion on the list.) In 2012 Mokdad contacted the DHS. The department neither confirmed nor denied that he was on the no-fly list but “determined that no changes or corrections are warranted at this time.” In 2013 Mokdad filed a civil case against the US attorney general, the FBI director, and the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) director, challenging his inclusion on the list. The Arab-American Civil Rights League (ACRL) represented Mokdad. His case is still undecided.
Meanwhile, a court of appeals ruled in 2015 that lower courts could hear similar cases challenging the no-fly list. This would allow more people to have their cases heard more easily. ACRL civil rights attorney Nabih Ayad praised the decision as a step forward for Muslims, Arabs, and others of Middle Eastern descent whom the government has deemed suspicious based on racial profiling. “This ruling confirms what we at the ACRL have stated from day one—that the unwarranted and unconstitutional profiling of an entire group of people simply based on their ethnicity must be struck down as a violation of this nation’s highest law: the Constitution.”
A Ban on Muslims?
In 2015 and 2016, American fear and anger toward Muslims spiked again after Islamist terrorists carried out coordinated attacks in France, Belgium, and the United States. The attacks coincided with an ongoing refugee crisis, as millions of people—most of whom are Muslims—fled the war-torn Middle Eastern nation of Syria. Governors of several states declared that their states would not receive any more Syrian refugees for the time being. Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump called for further measures, such as shutting down mosques in the United States, blocking all Muslims from entering the country, and setting up a database to register and track Muslims already in the United States.
Other influential figures on both sides of the political aisle endorsed at least some monitoring of Muslims. Businessperson Haim Saban, a major contributor to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said, “The reality is that certain things that are unacceptable in times of peace—such as profiling, listening in on anyone and everybody who looks suspicious, or interviewing Muslims in a more intense way than interviewing Christian refugees—[are] all acceptable [during war]. Why? Because we value life more than our civil liberties.”
Other Americans disagreed. After a June 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, carried out by a US citizen who was a nonpracticing Muslim, resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment among civilians and politicians intensified. Communities of color and civil rights advocacy groups condemned these reactions. One group, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), said in a statement, “Furthering such rhetoric will only lead to more policies that normalize surveillance of and violence against APIs [Asian and Pacific Islanders] and other communities of color. . . . NQAPIA advocates firmly against policies that profile and instill fear in our communities.”