Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Internal Bradley grant documents outline the money trail into the anti-Muslim networks. By 2013 a Center for Security Policy grant request for $120,000 to cover “general operations” was pro forma, though Bradley staff recommended only a $50,000 grant that year. Since 1988 Bradley had given Gaffney’s small group $1.3 million, slightly less than the $1.5 million financiers had doled out to the mainstream defense group the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment since 1995. The vast majority of the Bradleys’ largesse, $905,000, was distributed after 9/11. The 2013 grant request scarcely and only euphemistically mentioned Gaffney’s work against Islam, referring to it simply as “monitor[ing] Islamist political movements active in U.S. borders.” It contained no mention of the anti-sharia bill campaign. More important was the center’s “coalition” work connecting “policy experts” with congressional staff, “state law enforcement and legislatures.” The Bradleys hardly accounted for the lion’s share of the Center for Security Policy’s funding. Tax records indicate that the center took in nearly $4.5 million in 2011, a year the Bradleys contributed $70,000, representing 1.5 percent of its funding. But while even Fox News would rarely book Gaffney, the conservative financial infrastructure was willing to bankroll him. The Scaife foundations underwrote the Center for Security Policy to a much larger degree, doling out $2.9 million between 2001 and 2009.

  Inevitably the sharia panic reached Capitol Hill Republicans, though only on the fringes at first. In 2011 an obscure Florida group, Citizens for National Security, gathered supporters into the Rayburn House Office Building basement. It had called a press conference to announce that thousands of Americans were secret Muslim Brotherhood sleeper agents, “a fifth column movement,” according to founder Peter Leitner, working to “eventually erode [America’s] institutions, policies, and sense of self.” Leitner claimed to have compiled his list from “open source” internet searches connecting anyone in America in whatever way to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was not a banned organization in the United States. A protesting student from American University, Udit Thakur, wondered, “How do I know my Facebook page won’t be an ‘open source’ of information for them?”

  To release the names of the alleged six thousand individuals and two hundred organizations would be “irresponsible,” Leitner said. He acknowledged that being charged with a crime was not a prerequisite for inclusion. A graphic he provided to reporters to illustrate the network of subversion looked, he conceded, “like a plate of spaghetti,” but he insisted on his analytical rigor.

  It was not a well-attended event, and its placement in the basement was testimony to its social position. Its shepherd was Florida’s new Republican congressman, Allen West. The nativist right adored West for his willingness to fire a gun near the head of an Iraqi man he was interrogating and then for enduring martyrdom at the hands of the politically correct army. They also liked that he was a rare Black Republican who thought as they did. Leitner’s warning against the Islamization of America, West agreed, “is about the protection of each and every American citizen.” It was a statement about whose citizenship was guaranteed and whose was conditional.

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  AS DISTINCT AS THE RIGHT’S hostility to Islam was, it fit neatly within a long-standing hostility to immigration that was boiling over. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2010 that 136 new “furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups” had arisen since Obama’s inauguration. That April, Arizona, led by Tea Party favorite Governor Jan Brewer, enacted what became known as the Show Me Your Papers law, permitting police to hunt undocumented immigrants. Even as Holder’s Justice Department took Arizona to court, the law’s author, Russell Pearce, with Brewer’s support, mused about legislating against what he called “anchor babies.” The term derided the citizenship, guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment, of people born in the United States to immigrant parents. “This is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we’ve created,” the state legislator explained.

  Coming to Arizona’s defense was Texan Tea Party representative Louie Gohmert. On the House floor Gohmert attacked birthright citizenship as a weapon in the hands of al-Qaeda. He claimed he was told by an FBI agent (whom he would never identify) that al-Qaeda wives would travel to the United States to give birth, take the new American citizen back home for indoctrination and training, “and then one day, twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.” Gohmert was eviscerated on CNN, but that was less a deterrent than a badge of honor to the nativist right. The following year the Center for Immigration Studies, one of its institutions, attacked birthright citizenship through panicking over “fertility rates” of “non-immigrant” women in the United States on visas. Anwar al-Awlaki, the center claimed, was “a product of our current lax birthright citizenship rules.”

  The Department of Homeland Security had aligned immigration enforcement with counterterrorism. Border crackdowns were now just as sprawling as any other part of the war effort. In 2010 The New York Times reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents had begun boarding Amtrak trains running from Chicago to New York City at western New York state stations and then moving car to car looking for nonwhites, demanding they prove their legal citizenship. Their jurisdiction was as expansive as their authorities. Although the trains did not run near any border crossings, federal regulations granted CBP the authority to operate within one hundred miles of an “external boundary.” Nonwhites who could not show their papers—and who were not informed that cooperation with CBP in such a circumstance was voluntary—entered a maze of immigration jails. When a twenty-one-year-old New York woman originally from Guatemala couldn’t produce proof of her legal entry, CBP detained her for three weeks before releasing her in Texas. A CBP official in charge of the de facto border checkpoint explained, “Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons. We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.” Corruption within CBP was so routine that a 2009 message from its deputy chief warned agents that they would “find no safe haven among fellow criminals.”

  Obama had voted for Bush’s failed immigration reform plan as a senator in 2007. As president, and despite a campaign promise, he shelved pursuing another. Obama had a theory of how he would convince congressional Republicans to, at the least, tone down their opposition to immigration. With a policy that was as accommodationist as the Sustainable War on Terror, Obama would try deporting his way to consensus.

  By September 2011 Obama had overseen over 1 million deportations, putting him on pace to exceed in his first term the 1.5 million deportations Bush had conducted over the course of eight years. For much of his first term, most of Obama’s deportations occurred within the interior of the country, until deportations at the border overtook them in fiscal 2012—though CBP’s rides along the Chicago–New York Amtrak line showed how DHS could blur the distinction. He formally prioritized focusing on people with criminal records, but in practice DHS considered misdemeanor offenses—crossing the border without authorization was a misdemeanor—within Obama’s mandate. During the fiscal year beginning October 2010, DHS conducted a record 397,000 deportations. According to Reuters, by the end of that fiscal year, only half the deportees were actually criminals. The accelerated enforcement coincided with a lull in illegal border crossings.

  The deportations devastated families and communities. When First Lady Michelle Obama visited a Maryland school in May 2010, a little girl asked if the president was going to deport her undocumented mother. An immigration judge in San Francisco permitted a woman to stay in the country to raise her daughter after her husband was deported. Separating the family would be “unconscionable,” the judge said, warning ICE that its lawyers had “worn out your welcome” by so frequently trying to overturn judicial rulings against deportation. During the first six months o
f 2011, DHS deported approximately forty-six thousand parents whose citizen children had only ever lived in America. Colorlines found that parents were growing as a percentage of all people deported. It estimated that fifty-one hundred children languished in foster care as a result.

  DHS could deport with expanding efficiency. A congressionally approved program known as Secure Communities, which began during Bush’s final year, provided DHS with fingerprint records of people whom local police arrested and booked, the same information that the FBI received for its nationwide databases. Access to these records supercharged ICE’s identifications of the undocumented. A DHS task force in 2011 found that “in most cases” an ICE agent was not interested in apprehending immigrants for the reasons police had arrested them, but instead “because he or she entered the country without inspection or overstayed a visa.”

  Secure Communities met with a vociferous public reaction. Ahead of a planned nationwide expansion set for 2013, the task force held a series of public meetings and “by a very significant margin” heard objections to its implementation. “Many speakers commented that the program is resulting in deportation of persons arrested only for minor offenses as well as victims of crime, that such deportations split families apart, and that Secure Communities makes people afraid to call their local police when they are victims of or witnesses to crime,” the task force reported. Obama’s home state of Illinois was the first to revoke its optional participation in Secure Communities in May 2011.

  Obama thought that spiking deportations would purchase him credibility with the right for a larger compromise on immigration. He badly misunderstood their agenda. The conservative response was to pocket the deportations, call them insufficient, and reject any legislation conferring citizenship upon the undocumented. Not even focusing on morally blameless people could diminish the opposition. In late December, during the final days of the Democratic Congress, Obama watched as five Democratic senators doomed a bill granting a path to citizenship to people brought into the United States as children. Granting them citizenship would only be, at its “fundamental core,” a “reward for illegal activity,” said Alabama’s Jeff Sessions. Except when Obama’s deportations record was convenient to throw in the faces of angered progressives, the right portrayed Obama as leaving the border unguarded. “Comprehensive immigration reform” was no more than “amnesty and a few other new laws,” said Kris Kobach, the architect of Ashcroft’s immigration crackdown. “What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.”

  With Congress under Republican control, Obama could do little more than vent his exasperation. He traveled to El Paso in May 2011 to defend the centrality of immigration to American life while boasting of his deportation record and of continuing the Bush-era expansion of a border patrol force that had reached twenty thousand officers. “I actually saw some of them on horseback, who look pretty tough,” Obama quipped. He placed the nativist mood in a historical context of “fear and resentment at newcomers,” though his observation that “what it means to be an American” generates “strong emotions” was as close as he came to shaming it. He sought instead to reason with it. “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done,” he said, joking, “they’ll want a higher fence. Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.” Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh, who frequently called the president a Muslim, commented that perhaps the alligators “will do the job Obama seems so reluctant to do.” But Obama would not back off his accelerated deportations and other immigration measures that had not yet reached the limits of their draconian potential. “Being a nation of laws goes hand in hand with being a nation of immigrants,” he said.

  Maintaining the War on Terror permitted the nativists to cite an ongoing state of emergency. In a 2010 hearing, Representative Peter King of New York pressed for collecting biometric identifiers from visa holders, arguing that the absence of such a system “has and will continue to be exploited by terrorists.” Texas Representative Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, warned Holder that “amnesty” for the undocumented “could legalize many would-be terrorists who are already in the U.S. and give them cover to plot attacks against innocent Americans.” One New Mexico man told CNN his state ought to be tougher on undocumented people “considering the threat, you know, terrorism.”

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  EVOLVING THE WAR ON TERROR into a civilizational counterjihad was valuable to conservatives. Like the Iraq surge, it was a chance at a reboot. It distanced conservatism from the wreckage of Bush’s legacy. It offered an explanation for the lack of victory in the War on Terror, the one that nativists had warned about since Bush called Islam a religion of peace. And it aligned conservative politicians with a rising nativist movement that distrusted elected Republicans.

  In March 2011 the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee held hearings on his longtime preoccupation: the loyalty of American Muslims. Peter King, a sour Long Islander, had fretted in 2007 that America hosted “too many mosques.” Inside 80 percent of those mosques, he later baselessly declared, “radical imams” held sway. On Frank Gaffney’s radio show, King said that Muslims, unlike earlier immigrant groups during wartime, weren’t “cooperat[ing] anywhere near to the extent that [they] should” in the War on Terror. He claimed law enforcement was “constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders.”

  Muslim civil rights groups initially rejected and denounced King’s hearings as collective government persecution. When King persisted, they shifted tactics. If King, whom they compared to Joe McCarthy, was intent on holding hearings on domestic radicalization, he should examine it “in all its forms,” fifty Muslim groups and their allies wrote to congressional leaders. They explicitly referenced the rise in hate crimes against Muslims during 2010, the year of the Ground Zero and Murfreesboro panics. King, disgusted, rejected their argument as “political correctness at its worst,” since “we’d be sending the false signal that we think there’s a security threat equivalency between Al Qaeda and the neo-Nazi movement, or Al Qaeda and gun groups. There is none.”

  King began his hearings in a martyrdom pose. “Special interest groups and the media” treated his endeavor at measuring the loyalty of a minority with “disbelief to paroxysms of rage and hysteria.” But were King to surrender, it would be an “abdication” of the committee’s responsibility “to protect America from a terrorist attack.” There was nothing “radical or un-American” about investigating American Muslim loyalties; it was “the logical response” to homegrown radicalization. One way “responsible Muslim-American leaders” could demonstrate their moderation, he continued, was by “reject[ing] CAIR,” which he insisted was not a “legitimate” organization.

  The most vehement objections to King from within his committee came from African American Democrats, who reminded the crowd of the still-active lineage of white supremacist terrorism. Mississippi’s Bennie Thompson, the senior Democrat, noted that a member of the white supremacist National Alliance, Kevin William Harpham, had recently placed a bomb in a backpack to explode at a Spokane celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Texas’s Sheila Jackson Lee cited the case of a white man, Andrew Joseph Stack, whose belief that the tax code served plutocracy led him to crash a small plane into an Austin building full of tax preparers. No one was more passionate than Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who in 2006 became the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, a distinction earning him relentless right-wing scrutiny. Ellison’s voice broke and he shed tears inveighing against the injustice inherent in defining a minority as a threat. “Demanding a community response, as the title of the hearing suggests, asserts that the entire community bears responsibility for the violent acts of individuals,” he said. There was no one demandin
g that whites account for Stack, let alone Harpham. Yet King refused to “dilute” his hearings by discussing “neo-Nazis, environmental extremists and other isolated madmen.”

  More mainstream Republican Party figures had the burden of figuring out exactly what they believed. It was easy enough to oppose Obama; McConnell had done so on Guantanamo and won. Others, particularly McCain, kept the old faith. They knew the Security State was closer to their position on Iraq than to Obama’s desire to withdraw. Both warned of a disaster when, in 2011, Obama followed through once the Iraqi parliament would not authorize a continued U.S. troop presence. (“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy,” argued surge architect Jack Keane, conveniently eliding the expressed wishes of the actually existing Iraqi democracy.) But there was far more appetite to cast Obama as re-losing a war the surge had saved than there was to challenge the pullout. By 2011 Iraq was a settled issue.

  That left neoconservatives with a problem. To stoke outrage over Obama’s deviations from the War on Terror catechism that Dick Cheney had created called attention to the carnage of their wars. One solution came in the form of a group called Keep America Safe, founded by Cheney’s daughter Liz along with neocon impresario Bill Kristol. Another of Keep America Safe’s cofounders was 9/11 widow and prominent Ground Zero Mosque opponent Debra Burlingame. Burlingame said in 2010 she “ascribe[d] to the clash of civilization theory,” which she believed required “enlisting the Muslims who have already bought into the American program and not adjusting” to them. With Liz Cheney in the vanguard, it turned out neoconservatism could pivot neatly into nationalism.

  Keep America Safe ran an ad implying that seven Justice Department–appointed lawyers had the same missions as the Guantanamo detainees they had represented. “Whose values do they share?” the ad asked as a pixelated Osama bin Laden waved in the background. The attorneys were called the “al-Qaeda Seven.” Cheney explained her rejection of Obama as a disgust with his imagined persecution of CIA interrogators, something that spoke to her father’s legacy. “Threatening to prosecute CIA officials was indefensible,” Liz Cheney said. “It was just so far beyond what you could stay silent and watch.”