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🪵 The Threshold

FBI coerced Muslim community members into informing using fabricated threats

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tagsja-picks, seed, factual_claims, trade, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@kumar_islamophobia_2012, loc. 563

2 min read

FBI coerced Muslim community members into informing using fabricated threats

Evidence

After 9/11, the FBI approached him numerous times, asking him to become an informant and to spy on his community. He consistently refused, not wanting to be an agent of the state within his community. At his asylum hearing, law enforcement agents met him in court and told him that they had evidence demonstrating that he had supported a terrorist group. They gave him a choice: drop his case and leave the United States voluntarily or be charged as a terrorist. … Despite repeated requests, the state refused to share information about the terrorism allegations with Farahi or his lawyer so that they might mount a defense. … As Under the Radar shows, the law enforcement community routinely uses threats based on little or no evidence to coerce people to cooperate in the war on terror and become snitches—or face the state’s reprisal. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 563

Categorization

  • SEED: A piece on the ethics of informant recruitment in Muslim American communities: how the demand to ‘snitch’ weaponizes immigration status against the vulnerable.
  • XREF: connects to: The FBI’s Vulgar Betrayal program decimated Brooklyn’s Pakistani community — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 538; FBI coerces Muslim community members to become informants under threat — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 563; The FBI coerced an imam to inform by threatening fabricated terrorist charges — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 575 (+3 more)

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