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25 YEARS AFTER 9/11, THE DEPORTATION MACHINE HAS EXPLODED
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Murad Awawdeh
September 15, 2026
Common Dreams
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_ Rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are
privileges with an expiration date, and that date moves every single
time this country gets scared. _
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents walk a detainee out
of the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California, on
July 27, 2026. , Blake Fagan / AFP via Getty Images
For my family, the story of September 11 didn’t end when we went to
bed after a day of fear and confusion.
We were attacked during what was my first week of 9th grade. I was
looking out my classroom window at the Twin Towers with a classmate as
we inadvertently witnessed the first plane hit the building. We were
in shock. More kids gathered at the windows as a particular silence
fell over the group. We eventually moved to a bigger room with more
students, but with blinds pulled down. The sound of the second plane
hitting the building made the blinds pop.
I don’t remember much else about that day except that the room went
quiet in a way I’d never heard a room go quiet before. But I vividly
remember what would happen in the days after.
The city’s grief curdled into something else for people who looked
like me. Harassment on the streets. Windows broken. Women with their
hijabs pulled off on the street. Fathers, brothers, grandfathers were
pulled out of homes and businesses across the city and questioned like
suspects, not for anything they’d done, but for what mosque they
prayed at or what their passport said.
Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built to watch a few of
us is watching most of us.
By the following year, tens of thousands of other men were required to
register in person at the immigration
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they were born. Between September 2002 and 2003, 83,519 men registered
at intake windows across the country
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Of those, 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings. Yet, only 11
were found to have any connection to terrorism, by the government’s
own count at the time. A program that processed 83,000 people and
tried to deport almost 14,000 of them.
Six months into that registration program, on March 1, 2003, the
federal government opened the Department of Homeland Security
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which folded 22 agencies into a single new department built to do that
kind of work at scale. But this mandate’s impact on communities
wasn’t an abstraction to me. It was the agency that had just decided
my brother didn’t belong in our city, with a budget
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a mission that would live long past our nation’s trauma.
I started organizing more deeply because of what happened to my
neighbors and family that year. Twenty-five years of doing this work
has taught me one specific thing: The machine doesn’t stay pointed
where it started. It isn’t only Arab and Muslim families anymore who
get treated as a threat first and people second.
This year, Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $45
billion just for new detention spaces
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a 265% jump that gives ICE a bigger detention budget than the entire
federal prison system, plus another $30 billion for enforcement
operations
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on top of that. No one has properly enumerated what threat justifies a
budget that size. I don’t think there is one. Rather, it’s a
machine that’s been fed for 25 years and has simply gotten larger
with more zeroes attached.
What happened to Muslim and Arab families after 9/11
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happening to immigrant families now. But what I recognize is narrower
than that. It’s how a government decides that fear of a few
individuals justifies suspicion of entire communities, and how fast
the list of suspects grows once the infrastructure
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process them is in place.
After 9/11, I learned the difference between charity and power.
Charity helps people survive a system. Power changes what the system
is permitted to do to those in society. I’ve spent my adult life on
the side of building power, not because immigrants are just useful,
exceptional, or because of their economic contributions, but because
rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are privileges
with an expiration date, and that date moves every single time this
country gets scared.
Twenty-five years later, however, it’s landing on more doors than it
did in 2002. Others have said it countless times, but if some of us
don’t have rights, none of us do. It’s the exact lesson this
country refused to learn in 2002, when 11 real cases were enough to
justify tracking 83,000 people, and the tracking was made permanent
instead of undone. Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built
to watch a few of us is watching most of us.
We must fight for every single one of us because we have all witnessed
what happens when we do not. I watched it through a classroom window
when I was 14. I have spent every year since making certain that the
next community in the crosshairs does not face it the way mine did,
alone and expected to be grateful for whatever protection somebody
decided to spare us.
This anniversary is absolutely a time when we need to reflect on what
we lost that day as New Yorkers and as Americans. It’s also about
whether we’re finally willing to notice what we built right after
it, and this time agree not to let it keep growing.
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Murad Awawdeh is the president and CEO of the New York Immigration
Coalition.
* Deportations; September 11; U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement; U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
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