Over 80,000 Muslims registered under NSEERS with 13,000 deported on non-terrorism violations.

Evidence

NSEERS required all nonimmigrant men over the age of sixteen from twenty-four Muslim-majority countries to register with the immigration service. The program initiated mass fingerprinting for “higher-risk visiting aliens” at ports of entry, using “intelligence criteria reflecting patterns of terrorist organizations’ activities.” These purportedly high-risk individuals would be required to “periodically confirm where they are living and what they are doing in the United States.” More than 80,000 Muslims and Arabs were registered under NSEERS. Knowing where these nonimmigrants were located facilitated the government’s deportation of more than 13,000 of them on non-terrorism-related immigration violations. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 904

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on post-9/11 preventative counterterrorism and how surveillance programs generate deportations on unrelated grounds. — connects to: NSEERS targeted 83,000 immigrants yet produced zero terrorism convictions — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 551