Nixon-era and Reagan-era programs surveilled and detained Arab Americans by ethnicity alone

Evidence

In October 1972, Abdeen Jabara—a Michigan civil-rights attorney and one of the founders of the Association of Arab American University Graduates, the first politically active Arab-American organization created after the 1967 war—suspected that his phone was being tapped. He filed a lawsuit against the FBI, only to discover that his communications had been monitored since 1967. Jabara’s suit also led to the disclosure of a secret Nixon plan dubbed “Operation Boulder,” a series of presidential directives demanding that every person with an Arabic surname undergo a security check before receiving a visa to the United States. Operation Boulder further authorized the FBI to spy on the Arab-American community through compiling dossiers on people’s lawful political activities and even monitoring the magazines they read, resulting in the general harassment of the community. … By 1986, the same year President Reagan claimed that Libyan “hit squads” had entered the country to assassinate him (a charge later revealed as a “complete fabrication” by FBI assistant director Oliver Revell), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) circulated an internal document titled “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan.” The program called for the wide-scale registration and detention of nationals from Iran and seven Arab nations in an Oakdale, Louisiana, camp that had already been prepared with fencing and sanitation facilities in the event of a major conflict in the Middle East. With shades of Japanese internment (and a precursor to post–September 11 policies), the INS contemplated housing large numbers of people on the camp’s thousand acres, conceding in the memo that the plan “indiscriminately lumps together individuals of widely differing political opinions solely on the basis of nationality.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 982

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the internment of Japanese Americans precedent and to post-9/11 policies; also resonates with the INS containment infrastructure logic of camps built ahead of need. — connects to: A Reagan-era DOJ plan identified a Louisiana camp for interning Arab Americans — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 544; Reagan-era DOJ drew up internment-camp plans for Arab Americans — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 544; Reagan-era DOJ drew up internment-camp plans for Arab Americans and prosecuted the LA 8. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 556
• ADDENDUM: Fits ‘On Sacrifice’ theme of state violence pre-positioned as infrastructure — but more directly a companion to documented Arab-American community repression narratives.