Captive Intelligence: Anti-Muslim Racism, Extractive Capital & Liberal Humanism in the Making of Muslim Immigrant Informants

In this talk, Dr. Amir Aziz examines post-9/11 informant recruitment programs that have enlisted Muslim immigrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants across the New York City metropolitan area. Dr. Aziz argues that federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI have particularly targeted Muslim immigrant women and gender non-normative Muslim immigrants of South Asian, South-East Asian, and South West Asian and North African (SWANA) background with vulnerable immigration status. Agents ply them with false promises of immigration relief and employ removal threats to coax them into becoming 'compliant informants. Despite how cases like Hassan v. City of New York and FBI v. Fazaga have attempted to end the suspicionless surveillance and intelligence recruitment of Muslims, such practices are informally authorized outside the judicial purview. The impossibility of subjects to seek redress further underlines the limits of humanist protocols of liberal rights and representation, pointing to how such gendered/racialized practices of violability and containment are constitutive to liberal modernity's conception of the human subject.
Dr. Aziz's talk is part of a broader book project that traces how carceral practices of detention, disablement, and debility have circulated through/from Guantánamo Bay and the occupation-zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to become endemic practices integrated into the operational ethos of ICE and other domestic law enforcement agencies, emerging via a global carceral nexus of anti-Arab, anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim racisms.