Abstract
Where was the FBI in the months leading up to the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol in 2021? Among the many questions surrounding that historic day, this one reveals the extent to which double standards in law enforcement threaten our nation’s security. For weeks, Donald Trump’s far right-wing supporters had been publicly calling for and planning a protest in Washington, D.C. on January 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2021 presidential election results. Had they been following credible threats to domestic security, officials would have attempted to stop the Proud Boys and QAnon from breaching the Capitol perimeter. Yet when the day came, the mob of pro-Trump extremists seemed to catch law enforcement by surprise. They seized the Capitol, ransacked congress members’ offices, and openly posted photos of their destruction and their weapons online. In the preceding two decades, the U.S. government has poured money into a behemoth national security apparatus. The FBI’s annual budget ballooned from $3 billion in 1999 to nearly $10 billion today. Much of this 300% increase went to countering terrorism with a mandate to surveil, investigate, and prosecute “homegrown terrorists.” In no uncertain terms, the directive was for the FBI to target Muslim communities.
In the preceding two decades, the U.S. government has poured money into a behemoth national security apparatus. The FBI’s annual budget ballooned from $3 billion in 1999 to nearly $10 billion today. Much of this 300% increase went to countering terrorism with a mandate to surveil, investigate, and prosecute “homegrown terrorists.” In no uncertain terms, the directive was for the FBI to target Muslim communities. With bipartisan political support and significant resources backing them, FBI agents are tasked to prey on young, mentally ill, indigent, or otherwise vulnerable Muslim men as targets in government-led sting operations. Before the ubiquity of social media, agents fished for their targets through the surveillance of mosques, cafes frequented by Muslim customers, online chat rooms, and Muslim community organizations. The FBI, however, soon discovered the number of Muslims in the U.S. planning legitimate terrorist plots is sparse. Instead of shifting its attention to burgeoning right-wing extremists seeking to attack minorities and overthrow the government, the FBI deployed its resources towards hiring dubious informants who manipulate and coerce Muslim men in fake terrorist plots.
Accordingly, this Article is the first in a series that empirically test the normative claim made in the author’s book The Racial Muslim that Muslim identity is securitized. Specifically, their religious identity racializes Muslims as a suspect race deserving of selective national security law enforcement, as opposed to a religious minority to be protected from religious persecution by the state or public. The series of articles interrogate the claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has been manufacturing a purported “Muslim homegrown terrorism” threat since 2001. The legal and policy claims are based on an empirical review of the author’s database of 612 federal terrorism-related cases against Muslim defendants between 2001 and 2021, of which at least 282 cases are sting operations.