Amir Aziz examines how anti-Muslim racism and state surveillance exploit vulnerable immigrants, revealing the deep entanglement of liberalism with racialized and gendered systems of control
Post-9/11 informant recruitment programs have enlisted Muslim immigrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants across the New York City metropolitan area. This article highlights arguments made by Amir Aziz in his presentation at the Orfalea Center on May 14th, 2024, entitled “Captive Intelligence: Anti-Muslim Racism, Extractive Capital & Liberal Humanism in the Making of Muslim Immigrant Informants.” Amir Aziz is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. 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 SouthWest Asian and North African (SWANA) background with vulnerable immigration status. Agents ply them with false promises of immigration support 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 barriers subjects face in seeking 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.
Although the US Department of Justice expressly forbids intelligence agencies from engaging in these predatory practices, they are still widely employed, utilizing immigration related pressure points to recruit informants from Muslim communities. Aziz stressed that these practices raise serious legal, constitutional, and ethical questions: Who will prevent abuses of power against informants? Is the acquisition of secret intelligence from vulnerable immigrant sources defensible on constitutional grounds? Are informants guilty of spying on their communities, or does blame fall on the government? Could these subjects ever hope for remedy or freedom?
According to Aziz, these questions prompt two main interventions. The first intervention has to do with the history of shifts in information gathering. Human sources for surveillance is not new, and in the US, the use of informants is tied to criminal prosecutions related to counterterrorism. After 9/11, informants were recruited while using the lowest quantum of proof. “By 2014, nearly half of federal counterterrorism convictions were cases of individuals prosecuted through evidence provided by informants — informants recruited within the criminal justice system,” Aziz said. Scholarship on informant recruitment has tended to ignore noncitizens with vulnerable immigration status or undocumented individuals, as well as those recruited because of the post-9/11 shift in US counterterrorism priorities towards Muslims as the dominant demographic for surveillance and intelligence. On the second main intervention, Aziz noted “there is little attempt in theorizing informant recruitment in terms of how the figure of the Muslim informant itself is itself produced through the gendered & racialized logics of criminalization and the legal system’s involvement in it— that is, how the law itself creates the category of the surveillable (and detainable) Muslim informant, as opposed to the notion that Muslims denote some self-evident source of extractable, actionable intelligence.” Political and legal apparatuses are complicit in producing the category of the “Muslim informant.” Intelligence recruitment of immigrants is not an isolated occurrence outside the judicial purview.
Furthermore, the experiences of racialized transfeminine migrants within a heteronormative and gender-binary legal framework are often only acknowledged when they can be framed as victims of religiously-driven misogynistic violence, making Islam, Arabs, and Muslims convenient scapegoats for issues of transphobia and queerphobia. Their subjectivities and narratives are seen as more “authentic” if framed through salvific and secularizing narratives that imply the sexual ‘progressivity’ of the Global North. That is to say, the unregistered, so-called ‘non-existent’ Muslim immigrant informant becomes so not because of the absence of enforceable law, but because of the law’s capacity for gendered and racialized logics of criminality that frame women, queer, trans, and gender non-normative Muslim informants as lawful subjects of captivity and rescue.
Concerning the question of remedy for informants – could they ever hope that intelligence agencies would follow through with their promises of immigration relief and make them legitimate citizens? Part of the problem, said Aziz, involves the liberal promise of national inclusion, with the attendant assumptions that the subject desires liberal rights and recognition. What happens when the usual liberal protocols of visibility and recognition are the very same channels foreclosed to these informant individuals? The so-called War on Terror has subjected individuals and communities racialized as Muslim or approximated as Muslim to state surveillance and criminalization. Yes, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti- Palestinian racialization intensified during the ‘War on Terror,” it is not a temporal exception, but a state of permanent war, said Aziz. While 9/11 is framed as a watershed juncture in the production of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab racism, the racial figure of the Muslim has much older historical roots by way of settler colonial and imperial expansions that have defined liberal modernity against the racialized Arab and racialized Muslim. This depiction is consistent with the way racialized transfeminine migrant subjectivities are only viewed as “authentic” if they are victims of Islam, Arabs, and Muslims – their own communities. Activists have worked hard to reclaim the liberal sense of belonging by way of the “ Muslim-American” identity, yet, as Aziz said, “this remains tethered to a narrowed secular- liberal framework of state recognition of the human subject, subjected to biopolitical technologies of social control and extractive capital.”
Amir Aziz argues that “the private intimacies of racialized and gendered groups have always been forcefully mapped onto public domains as objects of state scrutiny; for them, there was never a pre-surveillance era where privacy rights were generously afforded”
Liberal Fantasy and the Private Lives of Muslims
A question still remains, stated Aziz: Could any remedy or justice exist for these informants despite the limited model of the liberal rights-bearing subject?
The offer of liberal rights and inclusion require the promise of privacy – domestic privacy in this conversation – a luxury never afforded to many racialized groups. The private intimacies of racialized and gendered groups have always been forcefully mapped onto public domains as objects of state scrutiny; for them, there was never a pre-surveillance era where privacy rights were generously afforded. The private sphere is rarely a reprieve from the stresses of public scrutiny and extractive economies of racial capital. Aziz was careful to stress that he is neither overstating the inescapable quality of surveillance, nor ignoring the private realm does or does not exist. Rather, he challenges how tangible responses to state surveillance of Muslims remain governed by the neoliberal tenet that the most egregious effect of surveillance is the coercive intrusion on the autonomy of “the enterprising self,” – the human whose freedoms, like the right to property, privacy, and free speech, must be defended at all costs.
Amir Aziz quoted scholar Jasbir Puar that to “imply that only the privacy and intimacy of the bodies are violated through such intimate bodily practices of surveillance belies a liberal fantasy about bodily integrity, a projection of wholeness that many are not accorded.” The outrage here, said Aziz, is not limited to the state’s prying eyes, but that, for many, the luxuries of private individuality never existed in the first place. The realm of the private and economies of intimacy are scaled back into an abstracted question of private choice and private freedoms, as opposed to intimacy, domesticity, and sexuality has been a longstanding axis of racialized social control.
The so-called private lives, choices, and familial relations of Muslims have long been rendered as matters of public security to be surveilled, policed, and punished, said Aziz, with a particular focus on Muslim women – their dress, mobility, and comportment – as public fodder to deliberate on issues from national security to sexual liberation. This invasion, according to Aziz, “disrupts liberalism’s axiom that there is a pristinely private life somewhere that the public and the state completely recedes from.” The Western obsession with the private lives of Muslim women and queer/trans Muslims and Muslim familial structures is exemplified through, for instance, the salvific narrative of “saving” them from Muslims and Islam themselves.
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