Domestic War on Terror policing targets immigrants through racialized geography and profiles

Evidence

As much as it is an object, the racialized Muslim body is also located in an imagined geography that designates spaces of suspicion across the U.S. landscape in places of work and worship and in particular neighborhoods (Bayoumi 2008). The domestic War on Terror, following patterns of surveillance and infiltration used historically by the U.S. government against communities of color, is targeting immigrant communities with renewed vigor. These racial geographies are related to the Muslim body through a set of profiles that determine identity and map spatial boundaries. For example, small-scale entrepreneurs, independently employed people, and workers in service industries are disproportionately targeted for immigration policing based on visa status and petty criminal violations (cf. Maira 2009; Nguyen 2005; Sheikh 2004, 2007). Further, Special Registration used nationality, age, and gender as specific determinants of suspicion. Based on a racial logic that predates 2001, the Muslim body has become a site of twenty-first-century disciplining of sovereign power. It is in this sense that Ruth Gilmore (2007, 247) argues for a definition of racism as ”state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group vulnerability to premature death.” — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 844

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gilmore’s definition of racism — state-sanctioned production of group vulnerability to premature death — is a crisp framework quoted here.
• XREF: connects to: White domestic terrorism still shapes immigration policy because Arabs are visually raced as terrorists; Foreign wars redraw internal racial borders that target domestic civilians of enemy descent — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 548; White domestic terror produced immigration crackdowns targeting Muslims and Latinos — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 257