The word “terrorist” wasn’t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States’ go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called “war on terror” transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to disparage immigrants and protesters as supporters of terrorism.

Related

Trump Calls His Enemies Terrorists. Does That Mean He Can Just Kill Them?

President Donald Trump has embraced this model and manipulated it for his own ends, as author Spencer Ackerman points out. The Trump administration often peddles spurious accusations of terrorism against the targets of its immigration raids.

“There’s nothing about any of their action that’s remotely anything at all like terrorism,” Ackerman says. “But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.”

This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Ackerman, a leading expert on the concept of terrorism and its weaponization by the state. Ackerman’s 2021 book, “Reign of Terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years, and how the boomerang has come back home.

“Before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were serious criminals, traffickers, and so on,” says Ackerman. Now, he says, the contemporary terrorism paradigm has transformed immigration enforcement into something “operating like a death squad.”

“What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time,” he says. “And now we’re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE.” With the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, “I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.”

As Democrats in Congress struggle to leverage DHS funding for changes to ICE policy — like a ban on face masks for ICE agents, an idea on which they’ve already softened — Ackerman says the parallels with the early 2000s are clear.

“We can’t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans,” advises Ackerman. “Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl.

If you didn’t recognize the voices, 2026 might not sound so different from the years following 2001.

George W. Bush: We are on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.

Donald Trump: These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators.

Dick Cheney: Terrorists remain determined and dangerous.

Kristi Noem: It was an act of domestic terrorism.

JD Vance: We’re not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

John Ashcroft: America has grown stronger and safer in the face of terrorism.

JU: In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the so-called war on terror transformed the way the United States enforced its laws and its priorities, both at home and abroad. The label “terrorist” became a catchall for a wide range of actors, and dissent against the Bush administration was often disparaged as support for terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act codified a reduction in civil liberties in the name of protecting freedom.

Bush: As of today, we’re changing the laws governing information sharing. And as importantly, we’re changing the culture of our various agencies that fight terrorism. Countering and investigating terrorist activity is the number one priority for both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

JU: The day he put his signature on the Patriot Act, President George W. Bush laid out how those new priorities would include a focus on immigrants.

Bush: The government will have wider latitude in deporting known terrorists and their supporters.

JU: It was largely an era of political consensus. Both major parties lined up to support the Patriot Act and other legislation giving greater legal latitude to the government, from local police all the way up to the president. But even then, there were plenty of warnings that these powers would be abused and stretched far beyond their intended goals.

Supporters argued that there were backstops, like congressional oversight and international law, basic human decency and strategic restraint. But President Trump ignored and shattered so many of those long-standing norms. A glaring example is on display in the streets of U.S. cities right now.

ICE was a post-9/11 creation as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. In his book “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” author Spencer Ackerman traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.

Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and many U.S. bases. He’s won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and his own website, Forever Wars. Spencer, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.

Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me back, Jordan.

JU: So we’re talking 25 years now since 9/11. Many of our listeners — as well as working journalists, and even many people working on Capitol Hill right now — don’t have any living memory of that time. So can you start off by bringing us back to the days and weeks after September 11? President George W. Bush essentially had carte blanche to pass laws and change policy based on the notion that he was making Americans safer; that we had to clamp down and, in some cases, give up some of our freedoms to ensure security. With hindsight, what were the most significant aspects of the newly born war on terror that have a clear through line to today?

SA: Well, one that we saw just this week really take prominence is the Patriot Act, which among other things, enabled law enforcement to more seamlessly get “third-party records,” as they’re called — basically, customer accounts of records kept by some kind of service provider, financial records, internet records, and so on — without a judge’s signature or a finding of probable cause. It occurs instead through something called an administrative subpoena that the Patriot Act supercharged.

And we’re seeing just this week, there was a very good piece in the Washington Post laying out the exponential growth in administrative subpoenas being used by DHS in order to get records that would otherwise require a court order to collect.

Related

Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist

Now, when the Patriot Act passed, the idea was that this would be the FBI surreptitiously collecting information that would prevent terrorism and uncover active links to terror networks and so forth. There’s not really much of a record of it having done that — certainly not a public one. But it definitely didn’t envision what DHS is doing, which is harassing critics of ICE.

Now, a ton of critics at the time, when the war on terror was coalescing, recognized and stated that this was going to be where the war on terror led. That it was going to become a war on dissent, that it was going to criminalize a tremendous amount of both politics in general but also resistance to itself — that we’re really seeing coalesce.

For the purposes of what we’re tracking, what we also saw after 9/11, is a complete sea change in how America conducted its immigration affairs. Something that I think people probably don’t remember is that before 9/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn’t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting........

© The Intercept