Remember the Victims of 9/11—Then Remember Who We Chose to Harm in Their Name

By RAICES Co-Chief Executive Officer Faisal Al-Juburi

When my parents and eldest sister arrived in the U.S. 50 years ago, they came pursuing education and opportunity. My dad, already a practicing physician, sought advanced medical training, eventually becoming dual-specialized in toxicology and urology. My mother, who had started her career in banking, bore the primary physical and emotional burden of keeping our family grounded in a new country, serving as our support system despite being untethered from hers. Together, they embraced our new home—my father faithfully tuning in to Saturday Night Live every weekend, fascinated by the American experiment in which civilians could criticize those in power without fear.

Yet building a life here required immense sacrifices and silent endurance. As wars and authoritarianism rocked our homeland Iraq, returning became impossible. My parents put down deep roots in the U.S., and I grew up reckoning with the quiet trauma of family separation long before I had the words for it, watching them grieve the loss of loved ones without ever getting to say goodbye. I saw the subtle discrimination brought on by their accents and learned early that drawing attention to yourself as an immigrant was a liability in a nation that has feigned its promise to welcome. When they finally became citizens and voted for the first time 30 years ago, it gave them something they had earned through decades of sacrifice: a sense of belonging and a belief that naturalization protected their place in this country. More than anything, I remember their relief, our relief.

Then came September 11, 2001. I was a senior in high school, and our fragile bargain of belonging was shattered, our relief rescinded. In the panic following that horrific day, our government weaponized public fear, and immigration writ large was quickly recast as a national security threat. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003—and with it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—became the engine of that shift. Immediately, Muslim, Arab, South Asian, Sikh, and immigrant communities were broadsided by surveillance, profiling, and mass detentions. My family was forced to reckon with the reality that, despite our citizenship or deep roots, we, and so many others, had been relegated to the role of "the enemy."

For years, I have argued that the federal government may have built DHS to target people like me, but that it would eventually come for all of us. Advocates of the draconian policies espoused by the opaque and sprawling department, which consolidated nearly two dozen disparate agencies under a shroud of secrecy, often contend that such measures are indispensable for ensuring national security and protecting public safety. However, this rationale must be weighed against irrefutable evidence that these measures erode civil liberties. As we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it is crucial to recognize that expanded and unjust targeting is no longer a theoretical concern. It is our American reality. These policies now tangibly shape who is surveilled, detained, stripped of due process, and even murdered in our streets.

Over the last 25 years, policies implemented as allegedly temporary national security measures in the wake of 9/11 have steadily intensified, ultimately giving rise to a multi-billion-dollar carceral enterprise. What began as emergency responses soon became codified into permanent institutional frameworks, evidenced by unprecedented financial investments, including the recent $75 billion supplementary funding package. This institutionalization has enabled federal agencies to exercise increasing authority and brutality with minimal oversight. Within this context, private prison corporations such as CoreCivic and GEO Group have become central actors, profiting from the government’s growing dependence on detention. Their management of facilities like the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where families are detained in accordance with shifting enforcement priorities, underscores how a culture that centers shareholder interests over human life has become intertwined with the evolution of these policies.

At RAICES—an organization founded long before DHS ever existed—we witness the human wreckage of this system daily. We see it in clients like Soofia, a 19-year-old who fled violence in Iran only to be torn from her family and locked in detention, facing removal for over a year because an arbitrary age threshold stripped her of her family unit. We see it when fast-tracked deportations bypass independent judicial review, when local police are co-opted through state laws like Texas’s SB4 to profile our neighbors, and when due process in asylum adjudications is obstructed through collusion between DHS and the Department of Justice. What began as targeted suspicion against Arab and Muslim Americans (and anyone who “looked” like us) post-9/11 has metastasized into state-sanctioned violence that threatens the constitutional rights of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Every September 11, our nation gathers to honor the nearly 3,000 lives ruthlessly murdered. We say their names, tell their stories, and promise never to forget. But 25 years later, remembrance also demands a full reckoning with what we, the people, allowed our government to build in their names and with our tax dollars, including the policies that followed and the power they gave to detention, surveillance, exclusion, and death as punishment for dissent.

If we continue to invoke the tragedy of 9/11 to justify the criminalization, incarceration, and separation of millions of immigrant families and justify silencing the American spirit, we are not honoring the victims. We are exploiting their memory as leverage for cruelty. A complete history must instead make room for the victims of post-9/11 opportunism: the children traumatized in detention, the communities living under constant surveillance, and the families torn apart, because these are the policy harms we chose through the systems we supported through explicit consent or the scourge of complacency.

Fear drove the construction of our immigration system. Fear eroded our fundamental American rights. But we are not obligated to let fear dictate our destiny.

Honoring the memory of 9/11 requires us to acknowledge and take responsibility for the structural injustices that have resulted from policies enacted in the wake of the attacks, recognizing that the current system perpetuates human rights abuses, undermines due process, and enables systemic discrimination against both citizens and noncitizens. We must end the for-profit civil detention economy, establish an independent immigration court system founded on strict adherence to due process, remove armed militia from our neighborhoods, and ultimately dismantle DHS. By undertaking these changes, we affirm a commitment to dignity rather than dehumanization, to due process instead of unchecked governmental power, and to individual and collective safety free from scapegoating children and families.

This anniversary, remember the victims of 9/11. Then, remember who we chose to harm in their name—and join us in building a system rooted in justice.