In the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the US government enjoyed broad, bipartisan support for mounting what President George W. Bush termed a “War on Terror.” We were told that “war” required new tools, new techniques, and new resources to fight a global, asymmetric foe–one that maybe was lurking inside the United States, and that was driven by a supposedly civilizational grudge match between the Islamic world and the West.
Some of those tools, from the Department of Homeland Security, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to the legal designations used to profile, surveil, debank, and indefinitely detain people and organizations with alleged ties to terrorism, were decried even at the time as massive overreaches of government power. Blanket laws like the PATRIOT Act gave law enforcement unprecedented license to surveil domestic communication. Much of the way this was deployed was driven heavily by Islamophobia. Street violence against people perceived to be Muslim skyrocketed. The FBI infiltrated–sometimes entrapping members of–Muslim community organizations and mosques.
Today, in 2026, those tools are in the hands of the Trump Administration. There’s a direct line between the infrastructure built under George W. Bush and NSPM-7, the Trump Administration memo declaring anti-fascists to be terrorists. And the tools they’re using to go after organizers were honed over the past 25 years.
To understand how this has impacted movement work today, we’re taking a look back, but we’re not going to stay in the past. Our guests today include Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, Silky Shah and Executive Director of Muslims for Just Futures, Darakshan Raja last week. We had a wide-ranging conversation about our shared political formation in the years after 9/11 and what their organizations are doing, in what feels like a fresh moment of opportunity to question the logic of the so-called War on Terror, to dismantle the weapons built to fight it.
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Episode Guests
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024) and has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over twenty years.