American Informant

Ramzi Kassem September, 2021

Part of my childhood was spent in Baghdad, Iraq, during the rule of Saddam Hussein. At that time, the regime offered free and universal education and healthcare. Literacy rates in the country surpassed much of the Arabic-speaking world and, indeed, the Global South. As the celebrated Egyptian intellectual, Taha Hussein, famously put it: “Cairo writes; Beirut prints; and Baghdad reads.”¹ Booksellers were everywhere in Baghdad. Its people read voraciously and passionately debated literature, poetry, and a range of other subjects.

But what struck me, even as a child, was the absence of sustained talk about politics in bookshops, markets, and other public spaces. I knew that adults could not stay away from the topic of politics in more intimate, private settings, where a deeper level of trust usually reigned. Once you entered the public sphere, however, discretion about politics—and especially local politics—clearly became the better part of valor. Iraqi society had been so thoroughly infiltrated by elements of Hussein’s intelligence services that ordinary people knew to tread with extreme caution. After all, the person standing within earshot at a bustling Baghdad market, overhearing your conversation—or maybe even your direct interlocutor— could be an informant. And the stakes were high: incarceration, torture, or death. That was an early introduction to the valency of informants—their capacity to interact with the society that surrounds them and their distorting effect on it. The lesson has colored my subsequent work on surveillance, including this reflection on the contemporary role of informants in the United States.

Scope of the Phenomenon

Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation officially pivoted from an ostensible law enforcement function towards intelligence gathering, in the name of national security.² Instead of focusing mostly on the retrospective investigation of already consummated acts, or organized conspiracies to commit specific crimes, the FBI shifted to a more prospective, supposedly preventative and preemptive posture, where one of the agency’s principal declared aims became the disruption of potential terrorists.³

The FBI was not alone. Other agencies, both federal and local, were similarly repurposed. Among the more notable examples was the New York City Police Department (NYPD), the largest police force in the United States. Because New York City registered the largest number of casualties with the collapse of the Twin Towers, local authorities decided that they could no longer rely exclusively on federal law enforcement to protect the city from transnational threats.⁴ David Cohen, a career Central Intelligence Agency officer, was brought in to helm the NYPD Intelligence Division.⁵ He revamped the unit in the image of his former agency, developing and prioritizing its intelligence gathering capabilities.

The deployment of informants in U.S. Muslim communities and spaces has featured centrally in both agencies’ programs and efforts.⁶ Though secrecy is the name of the game, making updated figures hard to come by, there are an estimated 15,000 FBI informants deployed nationwide.⁷ That is tenfold the number of informants when J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge of the agency, and more than double the number reached at the height of the so-called “war on drugs.”⁸ On average, the FBI disburses $42 million per year on payments to its informants.⁹ The NYPD also sent informants—known as “crawlers”—into mosques.¹⁰

The role of informants is not limited to the brick-and-mortar world. Informants have also been tasked with infiltrating virtual spaces to collect information and report it to their handlers.¹¹ Perhaps even more significantly, law enforcement agencies routinely weaponize personal electronic devices, as well as the applications they host, to inform against their users. Law enforcement agencies accomplish this when they seize and mine those devices or serve various forms of process on “remote computing services” to obtain immense caches of user data.¹²

Finally, other practices can be assimilated to the use of informants. So-called knock-and-talks, where representatives of various law enforcement agencies appear, unannounced and uninvited, at a home, workplace, or place of worship or learning, in order to question someone, are functionally attempts to turn that person into a source of information—comparable in a sense to an informant.¹³

What Informants Do

Leading up to 9/11, informants typically acted as the eyes and ears of law enforcement within organized criminal syndicates. Like the agencies handling them, however, the approach informants took was reoriented. Instead of hewing to a more passive posture, informants adopted an increasingly active role in U.S. Muslim communities.¹⁴

For example, Shamiur Rahman, an informant who eventually outed himself on Facebook, was instructed by his NYPD handlers to “create and capture,” by instigating conversations with Muslim students and others about “jihad” and “terrorism.”¹⁵ That strategy mirrors one followed by federal informants. The FBI tasked Craig Monteilh with infiltrating Southern California’s Muslim communities.¹⁶ Posing as a convert, he repeatedly attempted to initiate conversations about “jihad” with ordinary people, in order to report their reactions to his handlers.¹⁷

While neither Rahman’s nor Monteilh’s known efforts resulted in any prosecutions,¹⁸ the same cannot be said for the work of many other informants. To date, of the nearly one thousand post-9/11 so-called terrorism cases prosecuted federally nationwide, a third proceeded from stings involving informants.¹⁹ Even on cursory review, these cases raise serious concerns.

In United States v. Cromitie , widely known as the Newburgh Four case, a now notorious informant named Shahed Hussain offered his poor and unemployed targets a quarter of a million dollars to plot an attack with him.²⁰ The judge who sentenced the defendants commented that “[o]nly the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”²¹

Another FBI informant, Saeed Torres, complained to documentary filmmakers about his handlers: “They’re trying to make me force this dude into saying something to support terrorism. He’s not even a pseudo-terrorist . . . I said: ‘What y’all been doing for the last three years? Y’all seen nothing? If y’all seen nothing, then what you expect me to see?’”²² His target, Khalifah Ali al-Akili, a recent convert who had previously served time on a drug felony, eventually realized he was being targeted and went public, prompting the FBI to arrest him on felon-in-possession of a firearm charges—not terrorism—based on photographs he had taken and posted of himself at a gun range.²³

Even in relatively rare prosecutions under state terrorism laws, informants have featured centrally. An NYPD informant plied Jose Pimentel with marijuana to draw damning statements from him, and then followed up by pushing a ready-made plot involving pipe bombs, which Pimentel was unable to build himself, despite close instruction by the informant.²⁴ Pimentel was nonetheless sentenced to sixteen years.²⁵

No longer mere eyes and ears, informants have become something more. They routinely drive “plots” they had proposed in the first place, providing funding and equipment, and also coaching and coaxing their often vulnerable, gullible targets, frequently over extended periods of time. Indeed, the targets of informant-driven stings have included “unstable” individuals such as Pimentel, who reportedly tried to circumcise himself, alongside many others with documented mental health concerns.²⁶

Finally, the means employed to recruit and motivate informants— albeit not always unique to the post-9/11 counterterrorism context²⁷— incentivize the delivery of results at all costs and cast considerable doubt onto the reliability informants’ work and their reports. Many informants work in exchange for leniency in separate criminal proceedings or for money. Shamiur Rahman was paid $1,000 a month and police turned a blind eye to his marijuana arrests.²⁸ Shahed Hussain reportedly earned as much as $100,000 per assignment and Craig Monteilh inflated his reimbursable expenses so as to be paid handsomely by the FBI while mitigating risk to his credibility if he ever testified.²⁹ The government also leverages immigration vulnerabilities to pressure people into working as informants.³⁰ Finally, in a practice bordering on extortion, where the government creates a threat and then charges a price for its removal, FBI agents have placed or kept people on the federal No Fly List in order to pressure them into working as informants.³¹

Historical Continuity

There is nothing novel or recent about the construction by U.S. law enforcement agencies of suspect communities (or communities of interest), particularly when those groups are associated with movements for social or racial justice. The use of informants alongside a full panoply of other methods to infiltrate and spy on such groups is as old as the FBI itself. A century ago, the Bureau of Investigation, as it was then known, helmed by a young J. Edgar Hoover, set its sights on suspected Italian “anarchists” and Russian-born labor unionists, culminating in the infamous Palmer Raids.³² That pattern of activity persisted through mid-century anti-communist McCarthyism³³ and the FBI’s subsequent focus on racial justice activists during the civil rights era.³⁴ The NYPD, too, dispatched informants, plainclothes officers, and undercovers to report on various shades of political activism over the past century—the units carrying out that work bore colorful monikers such as the “Italian Squad,” or the “Red Squad.”³⁵

At the federal level, the mid-1970s saw the formation of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which peered into the intelligence excesses of U.S. government agencies both domestically and abroad. Known as the Church Committee (named after its chair), that body’s recommendations led to the creation of oversight, regulatory, and legislative structures, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, constraining the activity of the FBI and other federal entities.³⁶ Similarly, organizing and litigation efforts in New York City, including notably the Handschu v. Special Services Division lawsuit,³⁷ resulted in a settlement, known as the Handschu Rules, reining in the NYPD’s ability to spy on political activism.³⁸

However, these developments in the late-1970s and 1980s, while certainly salutary from a rights-centering perspective, begin to appear as a hiatus or a parenthetical in the larger historical pattern of law enforcement activity when viewed against the backdrop of what came before and in light of what followed, in the post-9/11 era. Indeed, as noted above, the events of 9/11 ushered in a return to sweeping domestic surveillance for the FBI. Similarly, the NYPD pressed successfully for a significant judicial relaxation of the Handschu Rules, clearing the way for its resumption of its own brand of intelligence work targeting Muslims.³⁹ Though perhaps understandable, the temptation to describe the dramatic changes in post-9/11 law enforcement practices—including in the use of informants—as a paradigmatic shift is nonetheless misleading.⁴⁰ More restoration than revolution, what took place after 9/11 was a return to historical form for agencies like the FBI and the NYPD.⁴¹ Viewed in broader context, therefore, the post-9/11 evolution featured far more historical continuity than rupture.

Towards a Theory of Informancy

What is the true value of an informant? Does their value to law enforcement reside entirely or even chiefly in the “intelligence” that they provide? The post-9/11 informant’s outsized focus on targets with no prior involvement in acts of political violence, many of whom displaying evident signs of psychological, emotional, or financial vulnerability or even outright distress, suggests that any intelligence gathered is of questionable worth.⁴² Further, the levers that law enforcement employs post-9/11 to pressure ordinary people into informancy—threats of criminal or immigration jeopardy, watchlisting, money—separately cast doubt on the reliability of reported information.⁴³ Informants in desperate straits are more likely to find ways to tell their handlers what they want to hear about targets who may pose no genuine threat.

The lion’s share of the value of informants to law enforcement and to the security state more broadly lies in two less obvious functions they perform, entirely aside from intelligence gathering: disruption and legitimization.

That law enforcement views disruption as a worthwhile objective is not news. The FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, which targeted Black-led racial justice organizations and leftist groups in the 1960s and 70s, listed disruption as one of its goals in infiltrating those formations, including through the use of informants.⁴⁴ The modern-day Joint Terrorism Task Forces dotting the nation also consider disruption a central aim.⁴⁵

But if the work of informants is covert in nature, if they are “ Confidential Human Sources” in contemporary FBI parlance, and therefore undisclosed,⁴⁶ then whence their disruptive effect? Both by design and by accident, enough is known about informants, among the public at large and, importantly, in impacted Muslim and/or Black communities, to achieve force-multiplying and disruptive effects. Periodically, the security state tips its hand, revealing just enough. For example, publicly filed criminal complaints and U.S. Department of Justice press releases frequently refer to the role played by informants in netting the purportedly dangerous defendant.⁴⁷ In such disclosures, the informants may be anonymized, identified only by number with designations such as “CHS-1,” “CHS-2,” and so on, but their presence and activity are nonetheless made known. In the rare cases that proceed to trial or that call for their appearance at the pretrial stage, informants may even testify, again, often anonymously.

The solicitation of ordinary community members to inform, via questioning campaigns, is also visible and known. Whether or not a given community member submits to questioning, thereby becoming an informant of a sort (or a source, in the parlance), matters little. The attempt to question, by itself, communicates a message that resonates beyond the person. The FBI, for instance, may stage an unannounced visit in a manner deliberately calculated to be seen by neighbors, coworkers, or fellow worshippers. The person contacted may tell others that law enforcement came knocking. All of that does valuable work for the agencies. The point remains disruption, domination, and control.

This more publicly performative dimension recasts informant work as an exercise in deterrence and communication (or signaling), as much as, if not more than, an act of intelligence gathering.⁴⁸ All of this is aside from actually or strategically leaked information and extensive press coverage of the topic, which also put targeted communities on notice of the presence of informants in their midst.

The upshot is that Muslim and/or Black community members, leaders, activists, and organizers know that informants are around. They may not know the full scope of the problem— how many informants have been deployed around them—but they know enough to be alarmed and they have internalized the assumption of surveillance. In that informational asymmetry lies part of the value of informants to the government—law enforcement agents and other security state actors would describe the widespread assumption of surveillance as effective “deterrence,” with informants punching above their weight because the state’s real or imagined adversaries or targets believe that the threat to them is larger than it may be in reality. It is in that sense that the known use of informants carries a force-multiplying effect.

As a result, a pervasive sense of suspicion sets in, along with an impulse to remain on constant guard, taking care not to make statements or take actions that might be misunderstood or misrepresented by any informants present or by their handlers, who are the ultimate consumers of the information streams that informants generate. Imams might feel compelled to install expensive equipment in order to record their own sermons, as an insurance policy of sorts, or they might be reluctant to take private meetings with newcomers to their congregation.⁴⁹ Racial justice and anti-war activists may not wish to welcome strangers into their organizations, for fear of infiltration. College students, who are supposed to be exploring and experimenting with novel—even radical—ideas, experience the chilling effect and steer clear of political conversations for fear of what a possible informant might take out of context or misreport to security state handlers.⁵⁰

While policymakers and security state apologists are wont to paint this facet of informant work as effective deterrence, the empirical evidence to back up that claim is scarce, to put it generously. All there is to show for it is the absence of an event: the public is asked to accept that, but for these mighty efforts by agents and their informants, dastardly plots would have come to fruition with devastating consequence.⁵¹ The so-called foiled plots may have been detailed in splashy but questionable “terrorism sting” prosecutions or they may have been left entirely to the public imagination. More visible, on the other hand, are the traces of the disruption caused by the deployment of informants as part of a larger architecture of surveillance—community building and movement work are stalled, the important civic and political work of organizing to challenge security state practices or foreign policy paralyzed or delayed.

Domination is one of the dividends of disruption. By sowing fear and distrust, and by hobbling the efforts of communities and movements to organize, the deployment of informants serves to assert state control over likely sites and constituencies of contestation to the state’s claims and actions, domestically and overseas.

The disruptive function of informants harks back to the workings of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, at least as theorized by Michel Foucault. In a series of letters authored in 1787, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham expounded his vision of “a new principle of construction applicable to any sort of establishment, in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection.”⁵² What he touted as “[a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example. . .”⁵³ was no more than a simple architectural idea. The proposed structure comprises a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the edifice to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are backlit and isolated from one another by walls or less imposing cleavages, depending on the purpose to which the structure is dedicated. The residents of the Panopticon are subject to scrutiny—both collectively and individually—by an unseen observer in the central tower.⁵⁴

The essential elements of Bentham’s plan are the centrality of the inspector’s position combined with the asymmetrical gaze created by the structure, allowing the inspector to see without being seen.⁵⁵ Perpetual awareness by the inmates of the possibility of being observed at any moment turns uncertainty into a means of subordination.⁵⁶ The circular shape of the structure and the inspector’s position therein reduce the costs and difficulties of policing, such that a single inspector can realize the aforementioned risk of which the inmates are so keenly aware, merely by turning his gaze from one cell to the next. Indeed, in a passage that obliquely sets up the Panopticon as a secular parody of divine omniscience, Bentham describes the plan’s advantages as resting primarily on “the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression), combined with the extreme facility of his real presence .”⁵⁷ Isolation is another feature playing an important though variable role in this scheme. In a Panopticon used as a penitentiary, for example, isolating the inmates would forestall any attempt at subversion, escape, or other such conspiracy by removing all common spaces and preventing contacts among inmates.⁵⁸ Irrespective of the purpose to which the tool is applied, however, its success is guaranteed by making the inmates “not only suspect , but be assured , that whatever they do is known, even though that should not be the case.”⁵⁹

The Panopticon was the subject of little and mostly derisive attention until Michel Foucault resuscitated the concept in Surveiller et punir .⁶⁰ Foucault considered Bentham’s Panopticon as a salient part of an important historical moment. In his view, the concept marked a transition from punishment of the body to discipline directed at the mind; it constituted a prototype for a new physics of power. Foucault’s analysis succeeds in isolating and appreciating Bentham’s contributions to disciplinary modes of control. By turning visibility into a trap for the inmate; by ensuring that, through the combined effects of isolation and the asymmetrical gaze, the occupant of the Panopticon becomes “the object of information, never the subject in communication,” Bentham created a self-sustaining system of power borne by the very individuals it controls since they can never be free of the possibility of being watched and consequently internalize the surveillance mechanism, becoming their own inspectors.⁶¹ More than a mere solution to a technical problem, Foucault saw the Panopticon as a blueprint for an entire societal type.⁶² That Bentham presented his project as a self-contained institution should not blind us to the fact that it is really a scalable model, “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form,”⁶³ argued Foucault.

The possible presence of informants installs the targets of surveillance in a panoptic dynamic. They become the inmates of Bentham’s and Foucault’s prison, subject to both the asymmetrical gaze—being seen without seeing in return—and to a sense of uncertainty about whether and when they are being watched. The third core panoptic element, isolation, is not structural in the literal sense in our context, not in the way that inmates are separated from one another by physical walls in a panoptic penitentiary. But isolation flows from the possible presence of informants in a community or in movement spaces, sowing discord and distrust, thereby separating community members and activists from one another.

At this juncture in the analysis, it bears emphasis that the color of surveillance is central. The effect achieved through the deployment of informants in post-9/11 America is not truly pan optical in that informants neither target nor affect everyone equally.⁶⁴ Muslim and/or Black communities and organizing spaces bear the brunt of infiltration by informants, along with many other forms of surveillance.

Informants, therefore, project the security state’s claim to ubiquity. Some observant Muslim clients on the receiving end have noted how that claim appears to usurp divine attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. Indeed, the presumed presence of close yet elusive informants is reminiscent of the Qur’(cid:162)nic verse describing God as “closer to [man] than his jugular vein.”⁶⁵ Far less fanciful, however, are the concrete ramifications of recruiting and deploying informants in observant Muslim communities and houses of worship in the face of a clear Qur’(cid:162)nic prohibition on spying.⁶⁶ My students, colleagues, and I have represented clients who declined to work as FBI informants in violation of the tenets of their Islamic faith and were placed or kept on the No Fly List as a result, in a bid by government agents to pressure them to reconsider.⁶⁷

Aside from disruption, an insufficiently examined function of informants is the legitimizing role that they play in the larger so-called “war on terror.” One is reminded of the “native informants” whose enabling role was dissected in postcolonial studies.⁶⁸ “Native informants” told European colonizers what they already believed, confirming pre-existing views and justifying with a veneer of local color whatever form or combination of occupation, exploitation, extraction, or war was being waged under the false pretenses of spreading civilization. Similarly, an important role of the post-9/11 informant in America is to affirm the regnant narrative positing the immediacy and urgency of an existential, Muslim-identified security threat on a global scale. However that is done, whether by in-court testimony or in government-issued accounts, informants legitimize not only discrete prosecutions but also and far more importantly a larger narrative, a veritable framework, along with structures of control and domination, both domestically and overseas.

The Path of Resistance

This is where most law review articles would offer prescriptions for policy or legal reform. Existing strictures governing the use of informants by various law enforcement agencies certainly leave much to be desired.⁶⁹ But the ultimate ambition of this essay, having attempted to situate the problem and then unpack its implications, would be to lend immediate support to communities and movements grappling with informants in their midst, so that those constituencies are then better placed to pursue a radical transformation of the systems that most affect them. Put differently, we must first defeat informant networks and their handlers on our terrain before waging the largely political and cultural struggle to defeat them on theirs in more lasting fashion, by dismantling the very apparatus that sustains them.

My law students, colleagues, and I have worked with clients, communities, and movements to face this challenge in two principal ways: through mutual political education coupled with a studied, holistic, and homegrown practice of informant extraction. Our platform for this work has been the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project and clinic (CLEAR), which I launched in 2009 with my students at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law. The aim was and is to support those who are targeted by law enforcement under the guise of security or counterterrorism.⁷⁰

At the behest of partner communities and movements, CLEAR has developed and employed a comprehensive curriculum focused on the problem of informants, refined to integrate and disseminate best practices learned across spaces and over time. The rights awareness and legal security workshops on the subject of informants that CLEAR teams facilitate in community and movement spaces, along with the literature that CLEAR has generated over the years, all aim to build power, not demoralize and discourage.⁷¹ The goal is to raise awareness of concrete realities and propose effective strategies of resistance, while remaining constantly careful not to promote paranoia and deter organizing impulses, thereby performing the security state’s disruptive work in its stead.⁷²

Informants are often told by their handlers that they have no way out—they must do law enforcement’s bidding, and do it secretly, or else. Often, as discussed above, they are impressed into informancy by the threat of incarceration, deportation, or watchlisting. Informants also fear that they would be ostracized if members of their community discovered their secret, and that they have nowhere to turn. CLEAR works with community members and activists to counter that messaging. We encourage informants to come out of the shadows and offer them legal and community support, provided they are willing to exit their destructive role with agencies like the FBI.

In that way, we strive to dissolve a web of informants that thrives on secrecy, shame, isolation, and fear with openness, honesty, and holistic support. We offer people who come forward and commit to quit working as informants the legal support they need to resolve any underlying criminal, immigration, or watchlisting issues that their law enforcement handlers may be using to pressure them into service. When the time is right, we intercede on the informants’ behalf with their handlers to inform law enforcement that they no longer wish to work as informants. We coordinate various demonstrations of support from community representatives and organizers so that the informants no longer feel isolated. Finally, we meet secrecy with transparency and publicity, working with trustworthy reporters to tell the informants’ stories, which serves to protect them from law enforcement retaliation while making it less likely they would be of renewed value as informants in the future.

For example, CLEAR’s informant extraction work has featured community members and activists turning up to support an informant’s decision to pull out of a relationship with law enforcement, communicated in person to their handlers in a public space such as a park or on a city sidewalk, in the presence of their legal team from CLEAR, along with members of the press.⁷³ Following that act—which is often experienced by the former informants as both terrifying and liberating—CLEAR has engaged in restorative justice work, facilitating and moderating meetings between the former informants and their erstwhile targets.⁷⁴ While such conversations can be difficult, they also create room for reconciliation and healing.

Coda

An accurate analysis of the role, value, and valency of informants, along with a mastery of strategies of resistance, remain as vital today as they were ever before in communities and movements that find themselves in the crosshairs of the sprawling security apparatus that is among the signature legacies of the post-9/11 period.⁷⁵ An entire generation of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers have been reared on questionable practices of informant recruitment, deployment, and use.⁷⁶ These agents and officers know little else—they are far less familiar and comfortable with conventional criminal investigative work. The old saying about a person with only a hammer seeing nails everywhere comes to mind. And because the bloated security apparatus developed over the past two decades remains intact today, it must seek additional demographics to paint as a threat and to target in order to justify its own expensive existence.

In addition to a continued focus on both Black and non-Black Muslims, there has already (and unsurprisingly) been a resurgence of the FBI’s historical obsession with Black-led racial justice movements. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020, with an unprecedented wave of protests against police violence sweeping the nation, then-Attorney General Bill Barr saw fit to activate the national network of 56 regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) against the movement in defense of Black lives.⁷⁷ The silver lining to that development is that it naturally highlights a commonality of both predicament and, importantly, purpose that should bind affected groups. The present historical moment organically offers an opportunity to draw inspiration and teachings from the centuries of struggle and organizing by Black people in the United States, combined with the invaluable lessons gleaned by Black and non-Black Muslims post- 9/11. Together, not only can these groups, with their allies, mount resistance to informants and the larger system they represent, but they can also contribute to reimagining their society and the world beyond without the harmful trappings of that system.

The Ban and Its Enduring

Bandwidth

Khaled Ali Beydoun

This Essay is a contribution the Michigan Journal of Race & Law’s special issue marking the 20 anniversary of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing War on Terror. It reflects on Executive Order 13769, widely known as the “Muslim Ban,” years after it was signed into law, as an extra-legal catalyst of statesponsored and private Islamophobia that unfolded outside of the United States.

Introduction

Hours after newly inaugurated President Trump signed Executive Order 13769 into law, airports across the United States were instantly transformed into holding cells.⁷⁸ Muslim visa holders from seven Muslimmajority countries were denied entry into the United States.⁷⁹ In addition to these immigrants, those applying for status as lawful permanent residents were also barred entry in the immediate wake of the Ban.⁸⁰

The swift enforcement of the Ban sowed chaos, and instant legal challenge. On the other side of the airport checkpoints, protestors stormed the terminals in defense of the Muslim travelers-turned-captives, challenging a ban that would become the Trump Administration’s hallmark policy. Virtually overnight, the American people were awakened to