Detroit’s Arab community faced the first and largest War on Terror crackdown

Evidence

In Greater Detroit, home to some of America’s largest and oldest Arab and Muslim communities, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has done little to alter this trend. If anything, it has reinforced it. No one predicted this outcome in the early days of response to the attacks. Because the principal targets of the War on Terror were commonly understood to be Arab or Muslim—all of the 9/11 hijackers fit this description, as do all of the countries the United States has invaded since 2001—it was inevitable that federal authorities would turn to Detroit in their pursuit of enemies and friends. Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of journalists and investigators were on the ground in Detroit, looking for stories, suspects, and informants. The first terror-related arrests were made in Dearborn on September 17, 2001; by early 2002, Dearborn (not New York) was the first American city to have a local office of Homeland Security; by 2003, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters in Detroit was home to the largest counterterrorism investigation in US history. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 667

Categorization

• XREF: This inverts the expected geography of the War on Terror home front — it wasn’t New York but Dearborn that got Homeland Security first; connects to work on surveillance geography and racialized policing.
• SHARE: Someone interested in the War on Terror’s domestic front would enjoy the detail that Dearborn, not New York, had the first Homeland Security office.