Since the start of its second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings and killings, smeared their victims as “domestic terrorists,” racially profiled people with the Supreme Court’s consent, expanded their biometric and social media surveillance capabilities while also maintaining over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists. It is effectively dismantling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, tried—and is trying again—to repeal birthright citizenship, paused all immigrant visa applications, and is aggressively pursuing politically motivated visa revocations and denaturalizations, among other extreme measures.

All of this is reflective of the rampant and unfettered xenophobia, Islamophobia, and white nationalism that define the Trump administration. Yet, at same time, we must also acknowledge that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) violence and Trump’s assault on the immigration system is an extension of the national security framework built following the 9/11 attacks.

ICE was established in March 2003 as part of “the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense.” A key rationale for including ICE within the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US legally via temporary visas. To keep “the homeland” safe, a more aggressive approach to immigration was thus deemed necessary. As Attorney General John Ashcroft remarked in 2002:

In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values, and kill innocent people.

Going forward, immigration enforcement and control agencies would police and surveil every immigrant as if they were potential terrorists. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) emphasized in 2004, “The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.”

In the name of counterterrorism, the DOJ launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) in 2002. Under this program, male foreign nationals aged 16 or older from 25 countries—24 of which were majority-Arab and Muslim (the other was North Korea)—were fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed, and required to check in with immigration officials at regular intervals. These regulations applied to both new arrivals and individuals who were already in the US on temporary visas. NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and finally terminated in 2016 by President Barack Obama—it led to no terrorism prosecutions.

Despite its failure, NSEERS, alongside other measures and decades of Republican fearmongering, functioned to normalize the link between immigration enforcement, border control, and counterterrorism. In doing so, it amplified the alleged danger posed by “radical Islamic terrorism,” thus setting the stage for the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on Muslims. This, in turn, served to distract from the far greater and actual domestic terrorism threat posed by white supremacist groups. As a report by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs noted, “In 2019, DHS publicly acknowledged white supremacist violence as a major threat to national security for the first time, despite........

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